Hey all, just came back from the field after a quick turnaround from a vacation with my girlfriend. It is also Advent once again, and the game is spiritually one year since Early Access release. It's a time for new beginnings, or at least reflection on the year that was and the year that will be. Speaking of which, what I have affectionately called "Tech Test 5" has been going extremely well.
Long story short: Rogues of Europa is going underground, and I don't mean in some sort of figurative way. The overworld is being entirely replaced with an open-under-world. Rather than an infinite-ish plain, it will now take place in a giant cave system. This was not a frivolous decision. I think it will develop the lore of the game world in a more interesting way, and it will bring the player more immediately closer to where the action is, i.e., in the monster lairs, towers, and catacombs. I'll introduce these ideas by going through the development process a little bit.
Totally removing the overworld. A bit scary, and not trivial.
The first thing I did was see how cave generation would work. I thought it would be possible using the grid system I had already been using for overworld generation. If you weren't already aware, this system is what causes farm fields to transition between different crops, fixes the locations of roads, and so on.
A map of the Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, overlaid with grid squares. This helped design what the cave would be like.
After looking at the cave map, I came up with a basic system for cave generation: as a path from gridsquare to gridsquare, moving back and forth more or less at random. This allowed me to minimize the storage size of a gridsquare to just a few bytes, which is good because I still want a very large map.
This cave segment is controlled by 4 numbers. The organic look is all procedural.
I then had a lot of tuning to do to make things render properly. I'm pretty sure it's all correct, but when I make a release be sure to keep a lookout for improperly generated terrain.
Each color represents a different rendering condition. Not every color is shown.
The results were very striking in my opinion. Generation, pathfinding, and rendering were all extremely fast, and the caves could be easily modified on the fly to create branching tunnels. From studying the cave diagram, this does happen quite frequently.
A branched tunnel.
Donut tunnel! Donut tunnel! Donut, donut, donut, donut tunnel!
After the success in the caves, I started to force all other generation into the grid paradigm (because it wasn't before). And it's been progressing with varying degrees of success, but I have full confidence everything will turn out.
An early proof of concept demonstrating room generation within gridspace.
A proof of concept demonstrating passage between caves and lairs.
I also had some good success generating caverns, which interestingly enough is the exact mathematical opposite of a tunnel.
Underground towns, lakes, and fields will one day go in caverns.
I'll just need a little more figuring to make sure the new plan is viable. If it does something insane like make 8GB save files, I might have to do some reconsidering. If not, I think this will be the direction moving forward. For next week, I will work on creating towns (for the third time - ugh) and with a bit of luck the tech test will be complete, and I will make the final determination of the direction I want to go in.
I'd love to hear all of your feedback on Tech Test 5, especially criticism. Leave it in the comments here, or send an email to [email protected]. I'll do my best to have a playable version out there soon which will have many of the main features that the previous version had. Ideally this will happen before Christmas.