Hello, this is Jaeeun Park, Creative Director of Blackout Protocol.
Have you had a chance to look at the roadmap we announced as we hit the PAX East floor?
I hope you give it a read as I tried to give a lot of detail and show you what to expect in 2024, on our road to the official launch.
We received a lot of feedback at PAX but we always look forward to hearing our players' thoughts so please check it out and let us know what you think.
Anyway, in this dev log, we’re going to talk about levels.
Over the last two years of development, our game has gone through a lot of changes in terms of our philosophy of level design.
In our current approach, each level has a conceptual framework (e.g. a warehouse full of shipping containers). This is then subdivided into multiple mini-areas, and we use randomized variants of these mini-areas (or the whole level) to give the player some variety from run to run.
This approach has had benefits. It’s let us make the overall presentation of levels really authored and visually pretty, avoiding that feeling that sometimes arises from roguelikes heavy on procedural content, where it feels like an endless stream of the same content, over and over.
But this approach also has some drawbacks. Now that the game has been out in the wild for a while, feedback from our players has shown us that the way we’ve approached things so far gives us limited flexibility when designing new content.
So: we’re rethinking our overall approach to level design, to expand our toolbox as designers, and provide more interesting gameplay experiences to you, the player.
Moving forward, our current thinking is to keep the levels we have, but remix the structure, by adding a bunch of new branching routes between them. And in these new routes, we’ll crank up the amount of procedural content. Essentially, we’re taking what we already have and building outward and on top of it, in the hopes of a result that gives players the best of both worlds.
That all sounds a little confusing, so here’s a picture that sums it up better (with some tactfully placed question marks to avoid spoilers):
With a top-down shooter like this, the simplest version of procedural generation would be to just string together a bunch of areas with randomly generated interiors – two ammo kits here, 3 standard enemies there, etc.
We actually tried an approach like this about two years ago, back when the game was in alpha. But we moved away from it pretty quickly because, frankly, it was pretty boring as there was no cohesive sense of how these areas were connected.
Since those early days, we’ve spent a lot of effort to enhance our procedural generation system, aiming to heighten the fun and overall experience it provides. And I'm happy to report that we’re starting to see concrete results. Instead of merely connecting areas randomly from the start to the end, we are implementing procedural generation of elements such as secret rooms and challenge rooms, fostering exploration of the levels.
While that may still sound a little simple, I believe that by incorporating the unique characteristics of each map into the system, the end result will yield very interesting levels indeed.
All of which is a very long way of saying: We're working hard to get new level content in your hands as soon as possible, and we hope you’ll enjoy it.
- Jaeeun
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