I decided to dive into the “Space” spin-off of Heroes of Loot (for those in the worry, Groundskeeper2 prototype is still alive, just on the back burner for now).
The spin-off won’t just be a bunch of new graphics thrown in, cause then I would probably be close to done on the game by now. I don’t like such easy money making schemes, and I actually have a bunch of interesting ideas that I want to try out in a new setting.
I did start with popping in new graphics, cause I don’t want any of the dungeon-stuff to shine through as I mold the engine into a new game. So I have a bunch of space-marine’s running around with cool guns, and a sweet backpack that has no function other than to look cool!
The biggest task is actually reshaping the level generator. For Heroes of Loot I used a trick that would randomly place “rooms” on a grid, and then randomly generate pathways to connect them. This sometimes meant a pathway from room 1 to room 2 would go straight through room 3, creating interesting dungeon area’s with sometimes multiple paths to take or big open areas with weird corners and such.
However, I want a bit more control in where and how the player is moving through this new game’s world. So I created a new level generator that starts at a random edge on the grid, creates a random room (random in size), then picks a random direction out of up,right,down,and left, see’s if there is enough space to add a new random room, and a bit of a corridor to link the rooms together. It then picks yet another random direction and starts placing the next random room there with another corridor connecting them.
This basically means there is always one clear path from the first room to the last room in the grid, and the player has to move everywhere in the level in order to complete it.. that is not taking into account things like teleporters, special exits, etc.
The new level generation now opens up the option to add interesting level things like special terminals opening specific doors, adding small “item” rooms to rooms and corridors, various types of triggers and aliens spawning near the player at triggered locations in a level.
now just to add all that stuff…. !
