Greetings Wielders,
I’m Niklas, the CTO of Lavapotion, here today with a devblog about how we are working with the levels for Wielders. Well, since this is a game with a much shorter development time than compared to Songs of Conquest, we need to figure out two things related to the levels!
First, there’s the question of “How important should exploration be in WotE?”. Many other games in the genre have various emphasis on this, so we needed to consider how it affects the gameplay and frankly - what audience it will attract! Secondly, we needed to find out how much time we could spend on creating exploration elements of the levels.
Behold our level editor in action!
Let’s look at two simplified examples of the difference we are talking about:
Brotato: Pretty much no focus on exploration. You see the whole map at all times. More focus on interesting choices between runs.
Vampire Survivors: Large maps, but quite empty at first (that later become more intricate - especially in the dlc content). But interesting objects, unlocks are placed in a location you actually have to visit a lot of the time.
So the question for Wielders is - where do we place ourselves on this scale? And does the high exploration emphasis from Songs of Conquest play a role in how Wielders of the Essence is formed? Our current theory is that, yes - we do want interesting levels in this game too. Mainly because we like that aspect from SoC and also that we enjoy some kind of exploration in Survivor type games as well.
Me and Carl, our Game Designer, discussed this, sketched ideas on the whiteboard and came up with a solution that we think will fit the game! I’m calling it a “Controlled” random map generator. We define what needs to be in a level and roughly where, but the exact placement and non important objects are placed completely random.
The current system divides the whole map into nine equally sized squares. In each of these squares we will place something we call “Set Pieces” - which is basically a designed chunk of objects that looks nice and has a specific function.
Those set pieces will be the base of the whole level. On any given level seed we can now make sure that in the north-eastern square there should be something very exciting (which also will be placed randomly within that square). We use a voronoi diagram to get semi-organic shapes and just pick cells at random.
The pink marked areas at the top of the map are where a set piece has been randomly placed!
Then, after this - we take a pass to connect these with roads using a simple pathfinding algorithm only using the voronoi cells.
The step after this is to fill the map with interesting objects. Also predefined, but the amount and approximate placement is defined through rules. So with things like destructible urns, we can choose to place them next to roads, for example.
After this, we take another pass to connect important objects to roads. We felt that adding roads gave players a subconscious desire to follow it - which became a powerful tool to nudge players where we want them to go!
And that’s the system at a glance right now. It will probably morph and adapt as we go, but the approach seems valid right now. Have you played Survivors-type games with good exploration elements? Do let us know in the comments!
Thanks for reading!
/Niklas and team Lavapotion