Now that we are a few months into Early Access, there has been a lot of feedback on the current state and progress of the game. One of the things most commonly requested is that of new maps to provide replayability.
While adding new maps has always been on the eventual roadmap for the game, it has continued to seem like an incredibly daunting task for a single developer / map designer, and would likely take weeks of work to create just a single new map. In the end, the game needs many more than just two maps to lead to the type of replayability and variation that is desired by the community.
Luckily, Unity 5.6 snuck in a unique feature that makes a particular map system viable. With the introduction of runtime-built navigation meshes, procedural level generation is now a possibility!
Over the next week, I will be taking on the task of creating a tile-based Map Generation system similar to Diablo 3.And while I’m not entirely sure the outcome will be successful, I am very excited to give it a shot and plan on sharing the results whatever they are.
There are a number of benefits that procedural, tile-based maps give over the current static map system
- Easy tuning of map length based on tile budget
- Quicker content addition by adding new tiles instead of creating an entire new map
- Significantlymore variety between rounds
- “Special” tiles with a unique effect/encounter (but not every game so as to become boring)
- “Map of the week” for leaderboards
During the week I will be attempting to implement the new dynamic-navigation baking, create a robust single-branch map generator, and design a minimum set of tiles required to create a functional map.
I hope to share progress as the week continues, though most of the work will be engineering a system to handle the tile layout and merging into a cohesive, playable map.
At the end of the week (by next tuesday) I will create a follow up post with information on the current state of the system and outlining the next steps, which could be one of the following:
- A post--mortem on why the system won’t work at the present
- The progress remaining and extension of the project for another week
- The immediate steps to roll out successful system into beta testing
If successful we will also move right into creating new environment art assets for a more varied tile set, and even if unsuccessful we will evaluate what new environment art would be most useful for creating new maps and scenery.
I am excited at the possibility of creating a significantly more varied game environment and am quite optimistic for the outcome. I’ve laid a bit of the groundwork this week for the system and I can clearly see the path forward.
I’ll be keeping everyone much more up to date on the QuiVr Discord, so if you are interested in some play-by-play action throughout the week make sure to join in!