A warm greeting once again Survivors!
About two months ago, we introduced our Experimental Process for creating procedural maps.
We've been prototyping ever since, of course, but we generally mix up the topic of our posts to keep things interesting for you readers...
If you've been following along, you've got a good idea of where we’re headed now, from the “Surprised/surrounded” combat system we introduced, to the original intent and current direction of the narrative...
This week, we’re going back to talking about Maps, and want to show you how we experimented with a base environment for creating “Procedural Maps.”
Experimenting with "Room" Based Representations
In our last post on procedural maps, we mentioned that we were experimenting with randomized rule generation, but after discussions with the art team, we started redesigning with the goal of creating indoor maps where specific places like “living rooms” etc could be more accurately expressed.
We needed a level design that would allow this “better representation of indoor areas” to work with the new “Surprise/surround” mechanic, while also aligning with the narrative requirement that players can gather “Memories of the Dead” through “Embers.”
As such, our first experiment in creating new maps was designed with the following goals in mind.
- Design a room with a specific theme, such as a Hunter's House or a Forge, following suggested room rules.
- Enable drops that match the theme, such as Throwing Daggers (Hunter's House) or Equipment Repair Tools (Forge).
- Place a variety of obstacles in small spaces, allowing for the "Surrounded" mechanic to be used well.
- ● Deploying Special Enemies/objects that carry an "Ember Shard," and allow them to have an Area Effect on all Enemies/allies, significantly altering the play of each map.
- For example, if you have a special object that has the effect of "increasing your 1-hit critical strike chance by 50% each turn," your ability to "kill enemies in one hit" is enhanced on that map.
- Conversely, if you have a special object that has the effect of “reducing enemy/allied vision by 1 space”, it will narrow your allies' vision, but also narrow the enemy's vision, enhancing “Surprise” play.
The test results for this map were positive, especially since the playstyle was significantly different depending on the type of Ember Shard, so we knew that creating multiple types of objects with special effects and making them appear randomly across the map would greatly diversify the experience.
However, there was some concern about whether this would be enough to continue to deliver a diverse experience.
First, since the size of the space itself was pretty small, we figured there was a good chance that the experience would be similar, albeit with small variations due to randomness.
We realized that while the differences in enemies and special objects could provide a slightly different experience, it would be difficult to maintain this considering the amount of maps we aim to make.
We received a lot of feedback that the hallway spaces felt cramped when it was just a single space, and when we increased it to two or three spaces, it was difficult to distinguish the size of the actual rooms from that of the hallways.
As we were discussing solutions to these issues, the idea came up, "Wouldn't it be more fun to have the stage be outdoor-centric?"
Experimenting with "Outdoors" Based Representations
The board game Zombicide, which we've mentioned as a reference several times, has a play scenario where you move down large streets, stopping at buildings you need to visit to complete the mission before escaping.
We thought that it might be better to have "multiple buildings" to wander around instead of "one big building" to capture the "apocalyptic feel" and create an experience closer to the initial theme.
In this case, the basis for procedural generation would be to generate and place multiple building modules...
For the new maps, unlike the solely indoor ones, we made the following changes.
- Create streets instead of a single "corridor" and have each building be separated by these streets.
- The streets are patrolled by roaming enemy types, whose alarm range is two to three times that of normal enemies.
- Instead, they have lower HP and are easier to kill, especially using “Surprise.”
- Each building has a "window" that allows you to check out enemy placement before entering the building.
The main intention was to create a more "exploring the space against unseen threats" experience. We assumed that this would be a level design direction that would be more in line with the FOG OF WAR system and scavenging content in existing games.
First of all, the reaction to the new content like “windows” and “roamers” was very positive. It was already a game where “vision” was important, but ultimately it felt underutilized outside of whether or not to set off an enemy alarm, and now it felt much more used in pre-combat situations.
(Of course, the window in the current example image is a dummy resource! Creating a new element called a "window" for gameplay would be quite expensive, so the plan was to first validate the gameplay implications with a dummy resource before creating it.)
The presence of Roamer creatures roaming the streets also adds tension and makes it clear that you need to take advantage of the new “Surprised" system; if you end your turn on the streets and are spotted by a Roamer, you'll be greeted by a massive wave of enemies, giving you a stronger reason to carefully enter the buildings.
However, despite very good first impressions with windows and Roamers, we received a lot of feedback that it would be impossible to use this map as a "Standard Map".
Initially, it was nice to have the feeling of “exploring the map,” but the playtime was too long and player fatigue was too high. We were concerned that “if the Dev team, who are already familiar with the game, felt this, wouldn't it be worse for new players?”
Our game doesn’t have separate "Movement and Combat" parts like Darkest Dungeon, but instead requires you to spend TP in every movement situation and to keep track of your characters' positions and vision, so while the "exploration" element definitely works well, we felt it was too fatiguing to play for a long time.
Also, the difficulty of combat itself outside of movement/exploration felt overly long and tiring, as the enemies you fought in the previous "small maps" still had the same health scaling.
We were faced with the decision of whether to further experiment with the outdoor maps to address their weaknesses while retaining their strengths, such as windows/roamers, or to revert back to the more "tried and true" indoor maps.
Since then, we've experimented quite a bit, so we’ll share all the outcomes in a post soon!
Last week, we said we would introduce the "Character System" and its relation to the Embers, but since that part of the game is still in development, we didn’t want to jump the gun. The maps and combat system are at a point where most of the development and decision-making has been completed, so we're going to introduce them first, and then work our way through the details.
As always, thanks for sticking with us and we’ll see you again next week!
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