Hello everyone!
The past few weeks have been spent working on procedural generation in studio apart(ment) so I thought I would put out an update on how it's going and some other things going on with the development. The game is definitely being made and I want to get some sort of a beta out before the end of the summer if I can.
Procedurally generating the city
This was initially super daunting to think about. since it's one of the core pillars of a roguelite, it can make or break the fun of it. A badly generated map can feel unfair and frustrating, and nobody wants that. I decided to make the city out of several blocks; the advantage of this being that it's easier to predictably place things like lamp posts, buildings, benches, and exits.
A few months ago i did try doing this much more randomly. The results were cool but not very usable and was just too random.
So I took a stab at actually generating the map and i started out by placing some roads. Easy enough, I just used a noise function to create a map and we had this.
Then I had to trace it with some sidewalks. This wasn't hard in theory, but I had to fiddle around with the numbers a fair bit. I ended up with this, and I was pretty happy so far.
I then made the exits which involved a ton of scene loading information I won't get into, but that took a fair bit of time. Most recently I have started on adding in buildings. One thing I love about the roguelite Hades is that it balances procedural and predesigned rooms really well. Every dungeon in that game features a random mix of predesigned rooms, which ensures a fair dungeon every time while still providing variety. To incorporate this, I decided that each city block would be its own predesigned block, which will make the city not feel extremely generic at every single block. I need to model a lot of buildings for that, but at the moment we have something that looks like this:
Overall I think it's heading in the right direction, and I think that in the end the procedural generation should turn out really well and make the experience of playing a life sim feel fresh repeatedly.