Good day Lightbringers!
Here we are again with a new dev blog for Empire of Ember! This week we venture into the dungeons, where ancient secrets await guarded by unrelenting enemies who distrust the intrusion of treasure seekers…😉
As you know, in Empire of Ember you can explore the world through a hex-based campaign map. Locations to visit include villages and cities, custom campaign map locations… and also multi-level dungeons.
Some dungeons are generated by the campaign, and some others will be unlocked as quests to research lost treasures when you choose to rest for the day and select the option to spend the evening in study.
All dungeons in the game are generated procedurally. There are approximately 13 different types of room designs, which are loaded at random when you enter the map.
Not all the rooms are the same size and each of them has multiple entrances and exits, fitting together like pieces of a jigsaw. These chambers are then randomized further, where objects can be visible or not visible. This means that although the same room tiles can be loaded, since they have the objects inside each room randomized, it will never produce an identical dungeon.
Dungeons are the lair of different kinds of enemies and in most of them you will have to venture alone. To help players, most rooms are populated with traps or explosive barrels, so elements in the environment can be used to their advantage. Also, certain rooms work better with specific types of weapons or spells.
A common element in all dungeon maps is that each floor ends in a boss room, where you will have to confront a mighty enemy to progress further. You may also find some valuable items in this room once the boss is defeated.
As the game progresses dungeons get larger and eventually split into multiple levels.
The difficulty of a dungeon is determined by how many main missions you have completed if the dungeon is generated by the campaign. Also, if it is part of a quest to research treasures, the difficulty is modified through the result you obtain in the dice mini-game when unlocking the mission.
Designing and programming dungeons have also presented some challenges to the developers.
Unity, the game engine that is being used to develop Empire of Ember, doesn’t support occlusion culling, a process which prevents Unity from performing rendering. It also does not support lightmapping- the system by which the engine pre-calculates the brightness of surfaces in a scene, with runtime generated content. However, the dungeons have many torches, so they had to use a third-party asset to bake the lights into prefabs, and then load this during runtime. It has been a recurring problem with Empire of Ember where a third-party asset would be good enough to get into the game, but had to be fixed or removed months later.
Another problem has been balancing how many monsters should appear in dungeons. The final solution was to define spawn regions with a chance per meter for enemies to spawn, combined with fixed spawn points for enemies in special locations, such as bosses.
Dare to explore the dungeons by yourself?
Then try Empire of Ember and do not forget to leave us a review on Steam! All your feedback is very useful for us to adjust and improve the game experience and will help us immensely with the development.
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Hope you’ve enjoyed today’s dev blog! We will be back with more.
Take care and have a nice week!