Resources? Check. Sufficient space? Check. Angry aliens? Check! We're setting up camp here!
Hello everyone!
We often emphasize that gameplay in The Riftbreaker is randomized. No two playthroughs are ever the same thanks to our intelligent systems that mix everything up before the player is set loose on the map. This week we will try to explain to you how the maps are generated and what changes between them on a run-to-run basis.
Building scenery pieces is very important - it creates memorable places like this one.
The survival maps in The Riftbreaker consist of several tiles. Tiles are smaller, square pieces of terrain prepared by us. The random algorithm chooses several tiles from a biome set - each biome has its own collection to choose from and biomes do not mix with each other. The algorithm then creates a map of the desired size e.g. 5 tiles wide and 5 tiles high, giving you the play area of 25 tiles (this is the size of current survival mode maps, we plan to expand the maps to larger sizes in the future). The tiles can also be rotated - the system knows which sides fit together and which ones don’t. These possibilities already give you a lot of combinations.
Sometimes you have to build your base in the middle of a space swamp...
In the current state, you can often recognize the patterns of certain tiles, lessening the impression of the world being truly autogenerated. We have a couple of remedies for that. First of all, we can create entirely new tiles and add them to the mix, making each one less probable to be chosen by the system. The second solution is to add some variance within the tiles themselves. Our programmers are currently working on a system to do exactly that, but in order not to spoil the surprise, that’s all we have to say for now.
The campaign mode will require you to jump to different locations, and all of them are going to be randomized as well.
An exciting thing about map randomization is the fact that each map has its own ‘seed’ - a set of characters that holds the encoded information about the specifics of the map. It gives us the option to enable seed sharing. You could share the exact scenario you’ve just played with your friends. Or, we could set up daily challenges so that you can compete with other players on leaderboards! There are a lot of possibilities that we can explore here.
A sneak peek into the new biome we're working on - the desert.
That’s it for today, we hope that this short piece will give you some insight about the randomization in The Riftbreaker. The next one we publish will tackle the idea of randomized resources, so stay tuned!
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