Hey everyone!
Time to move from Narration to a more "Game Design" type of content + beautiful art (which is always welcomed hehe).
In today´s blog, we will be talking about Room Design, which is where Game Design and Art intersect. This is why we have Nicolas, Game Designer, and Hadrien, Lead 3D Artist, with us today.
Zone Generation
The generation of Endless Dungeon is here to create diversity in the experience, characterize each district and maintain the “what’s behind the door” feeling of DotE. To do so, the generation of the zone must be highly controlled to create interesting exploration and combat situation while preventing unfair situations. We don’t want the player to find the exit door too early or have your crystal walk directly on a spawner.
Each room has a different nature based on the gameplay elements they contain (spawner, crystal slot, chest, merchant...) and their location based on the critical path toward the end. The gameplay elements are selected dynamically based on what the player has already discovered of the zone, for example the research machine can only spawn after one or two spawners are discovered (Each gameplay elements have their own special rules). It’s important to guarantee enough space between every element that needs protection (generator, research machine and crystal) and the spawners, to make sure you have the turret slot to create your multiple defense points.
The doors are key in the dungeon to control the pace of the exploration, making specific rooms critical in the exploration and having an “I don’t want to open this door” moment. With locked doors, we can create different zone architectures to make sure we open certain rooms and ensure interesting combat with multiple entry points for monsters.
"Level Build" Before/After
Art Direction
The main challenge regarding art in our procedural generation was to keep good visuals and lighting consistency through different recognizable districts. All of that without confusing the player with gameplay interactions and navigation. The goal was to keep good visibility of gameplay elements.
We’re trying to guide the players through doors and rooms without being lost and support gameplay interactions.
One of the main artistic intentions of the game was to display long and strong shadows. We wanted to give an epic and dramatic stylized feeling as well as remind of Dungeon of the Endless original visuals.
Following those intentions, some basic lighting rules were defined at the beginning of the project.
With those rules, we emphasized strong diagonals as well as rich lighting contrasts and colored moods in every district.
In addition, for each district, we used the endless lore writings to design and handcraft multiple sets of props. Those props had to fit level-designed patterns and respect strict sizes. The prop’s dimensions were set to accommodate shooting and navigating through various generated configurations.
To summarize, we tried to offer a robust system, while always keeping artistic intentions throughout the game and strong gameplay.
The technique behind the room generation
To add a new element to a room, we first define the nature of the element with a grey block (is it a prop? a navigable element? etc.). Every prop in the room is defined through this process. For example, a bridge looks like this.
Then we define the “matching rules” to define the constraint at which the element can spawn in a room. Here the bridge can spawn alongside a wall without a door where there I no other props:
We replace the grey block with the visual (and a few variations)
And finally, we put this element in different layers of a room archetype, starting with the big structure, and the gameplay element (turrets slot, chests...) to finish with the small details (small ground and wall elements).
Here are some additional examples with "Gizmos"
In summary, Gizmos is a visualization tool with the potential location of the different elements of each of the rooms, like the chests, turrets slots, Research Machines, etc.
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Before finishing with the blog I wanted to share more and more visual images, but I will restrain myself to just share 4 more.
You can click on each of them, so you can appreciate them with more quality.
Have a nice day ^-^
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