Weekly Roundup 85 - 15/10/2021 - Level Layout Generation Part 1 (Patreon)

Hi everyone!

Hope you've been well! 

This week is a bit on the tech and game design side of progress so let's get into it!

1: What's New

So this week was spent on getting started on the level design and dungeon exploration aspect of the game.

Up until this point the demo level everyone has played was 100% custom-made as a single map. It was useful as a demo to show off aspects of the game but it was also ultimately repetitive.

Where I'd like to now take the level design for the Bindmancer is a mixture of crafted & generated level layouts.

Crafted in that get segment is intentionally designed and generated in how these segments are laid out in the dungeon as a whole, including the items within them.

To that end most of this week was spent taking assets like enemies, prisoners, chests and other items and turning them into "Prefabs" in Unity.

That in itself was time consuming as prefabs need to work by themselves so they can be easily copied multiple times in a level.

Time was also taken exploring how to ensure the tilemaps themselves where able to be self contained.

Right now I'm working on "Large" segments that can be stitched together in random generation. they're 24x24 dungeon tiles across. As exampled above I've made a open "Enter Portal" Segment and a more constrained "Exit Portal" Segment.

In the long run these segments will be different sizes as well.

It'll take time for me to code the logic but my hope is that I can create a number of segments and then levels use some logic to assemble themselves out of them.

And then within the complete level environment the locations of available prisoners, enemies, and the like are generated from lists pertaining to each dungeon floor.

When this system is up and running it means level layouts and the layout of things within them can be more randomized. :)

2: What's Next

Next week will be spent coding the logic and building enough tile layouts to get the concept of level layout generation working.

What do you think? :D 

- Caroo