I'm super excited about the work done this month, it's opening up all kinds of cool possibilities for the future of the game and is massively increasing replayability!
Procedural Level Generation
While playtesting Survival mode, I noticed that I was getting bored of the islands that had been made months ago- the fresh feeling of discovery and exploration wore off after playing the levels a few times. It was easy to predict loot and enemy spawn locations which ultimately led to boredom.
The solution to this was something that I've always wanted to do but for various technical reasons hadn't fully attempted yet: procedurally generating all islands. This allows you to always sail to a fresh, unfamiliar and exciting island, not knowing where enemies might be, what loot awaits and what other secrets there are to unveil.
I know what you are thinking: procedurally generated levels often feel very samey and lack the fun of a handbuilt level. I spent a large portion of my time this month making a very modular and extendable generation system to tackle this problem. There are separate generators per biome for different types of levels (caves, forests, cliffs, open plains etc.) which allows me to get the variation that breaks up the samey feel of procedural levels while keeping each level unique. I'm happy to say that it is working really well and is generating varied maps not only for Survival mode, but also has allowed me to add a new endless Racing mode as a bonus!
As soon as I playtested the generator prototype, the fun factor of the game was back! Each run now feels like a unique and memorable adventure rather than playing the same sequence of levels over and over. Emergent gameplay is far more common with unexpected cave layouts filled with heavily guarded loot or packed with explosive fire rocks!
The thing I'm most happy about is that the generators seamlessly integrate new content into levels with each update, so you'll notice fresh additions and new secrets showing up all over the place, leading to a constant sense of discovery as the game moves through early access development. Updates won't be boring: "added one new level to the endgame" but will be more like: "added 20 new potential assets to the Tropical biome pool as well as 3 new sub biomes!" which will make updates more meaningful and worth checking out.
Here's a quick example of a barebones generator with 4 input assets: a terrain, some grass, a tree and a rock. While it's not hugely interesting, it already provides enough to explore.
So with this basic example (a single generator with 5 input assets), some variation is already possible by changing the seed as seen below:
This is only one type of generator however, and each island is made up of multiple generators that themselves spawn sub generators leading to a huge amount of meaningful variation that only deepens as time goes on and more content is added. Add that to different times of day per island, various weather scenarios, unique enemies and assets per biome, gameplay modifiers, dozens of potential secrets and more: there's a lot of content that can be experienced in interesting ways and can make each run play out differently!
Here's a quick look at some more varied examples (still using a very small asset pool):
As an added bonus, this has allowed me to make a Survival Daily Run mode which lets all players play and replay the same seed: this means that the maps, loot, enemy types and any other events based on chance will play out exactly the same each time which allows for a strategy to be developed both for speedrunning and to see how far you can get. The seed and leaderboard for this mode reset every 24 hours, so it's a fun way to play the game in a different way. There'll be a dedicated channel in the Crab Champions Discord server which will allow players to chat about the seed that day as well as show off their run and share strategies / discoveries in that particular seed.
Other Stuff
Fire Improvements
Fire now interacts with the environment and spreads: it is much more powerful but must be used with caution: I have been burnt to a crisp while trapped in a cave many times while playtesting!
New Survival Mode Enemies
As seen in the first GIF on this post, I've added new skull variants that shoot a bunch of bouncing explosive mini skulls at the player! Also added this month are fire ants that move extremely quickly and can easily become a problem with their fire trail that can block off pathways, giant armored crabs that shoot high damage homing blades and explosive coral creatures that reside underwater in caves.
Duel Mode
Duel mode is pretty much complete at this point with just more maps needed for variety. I am still finetuning the bot AI to be both challenging but fair: I plan to eventually allow these same bots to be an optional companion in Survival mode if playing solo, as well as a high tier enemy: a rival crab that happens to be exploring the same island as you. Prepare for an epic duel in these situations!
That's it for this one: see you next month for another update, hope you had a great holiday season and here's to an amazing 2021!
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