Dev Update 17-Aug-2016

Hello! Just came back from a little vacation in italy 🙂 Now its time for an update:

The project keeps going well. I do think a lot about what to focus on next, and to me, highest priority in development is to get something playable as fast as possible. So now, it was already playable but piecing levels together by hand is a task I don’t enjoy so much (mostly because I’m unable to do that from the couch on my laptop easily, I prefer hacking code while I hang out).

So I thought and read a little about procedural level generation and I decided to give it a try.
Here is what I got after three crunchy evenings so far:

Maze Gen v0.1

Thoughts on generation:

  • First and foremost, I wanted to have a logical traversable tree. Why? Because now I can do things like locking branches and putting keys in other branches without accidentally placing the key behind the locked door.
  • The generation is seedbased. That means I can put in a fixed value per level and will always get a fixed generation result. Thats not only perfect for testing but we will also probably give the player the option to enter a seed-base for a new game (for a more measurable experience) or let them roll dice.
  • I think, while this might be a valid infrastructure in reality, it might probably suck for gameplay, even more if it was the only type of layout presented. So I will use multiple algorithms and let them calculate multiple connected areas lateron. These areas could also vary in theme, like what you see up there would be a maintainance area, another one with broader corridors might be a sewer etc.
  • Generation and multiplayer will probably be tricky. Only the server may place netobjects like doors or enemies.

A word on the port to unity 5.4:

As we all know, UNet is still in development, and so I was curious what might break. Fortunatly it wasnt that much. I had to adjust some overridden functions in my network manager because arguments changed a lot in the base class functions. In my test, everybody could connect and disconnect/reconnect also seemed smooth. So I guess everything is fine again but who knows what further testing will reveal.