Merged Rooms | Patreon Weekly #72 (Patreon)

Hey Patrons!

After stumbling a little bit in beta, v0.9.0b has finally released to everyone! It’s now full steam ahead on v0.9.1, and I’ve already got a fair amount of those levelgen changes implemented:

New Level Feelings

As mentioned in Last Weekly, I’ve decided to add some new level feelings to the game! The ideas I mentioned in that weekly have now been refined a bit and implemented:

The first is a large level feeling, which amps up the number of rooms generated and the overall contents of a level. Large levels always spawn with 1.5x their max room count, but also have more items, food, and a bonus special room to reward the extra walking time. Here’s a pretty hefty sewer level as an example:

The next to be implemented was a trap level feeling, which amps up the danger along the ground of a level. A trap floor has 5x the total number of traps it would normally spawn with, but 4/5 of those traps are always visible. This leads to a more crowded floor layout with lots of chances to use traps against your enemies, rather than just more opportunity to just step into traps. Look at all the pretty (yet deadly) colors:

Lastly, I decided to add a secret focused feeling. Levels with a secret feeling contain a bonus guaranteed secret room, but also have an increased number of hidden regular doors. Crucially, normal levels have a rule where there must always be an unhidden path to every non-secret room, but secret floors ditch this limit, and so might be quite tricky to navigate! Here’s a harsher example of that, with lots of hidden doors:

With the number of level feelings almost doubled, I’m considering tweaking their spawning logic a little. I don’t want every floor to have a feeling, but also don’t want individual feelings to be too rare. I’m considering letting some feelings stack, so you might run into a large grass floor, or perhaps a dark chasm floor. This means each feeling could still show up ~10% of the time, but plenty of levels will still be regular. Let me know what you think of that idea!

Room Merging

I’ve also been making tweaks to level interconnectedness, with some interesting results! Some are fairly subtle, like a slight increase to rooms around the center and increased likelihood for rooms to be connected. The keen-eyed among you might have noticed that in action in the screenshots above.

The big one though is merged rooms. I have changed the logic here to massively increase the circumstances where rooms can be merged together, which can create some really interesting rectilinear layouts:

My hope is that this will take some of the emptier room layouts and give them a chance to become much more interesting in an emergent manner. I’m still considering how best to tune this logic though, as in the right cases it can get a bit carried away:

What Else?

Lastly, I’m still working on adding some more new rooms and layout types! I want to have a new region-specific room for each region, and a unique entrance room for the start of each region. I’m also still planning to look into using new layouts as well. I’m saving layouts for last though as they may be the most involved, so I want to leave the option to put them off for later if the update is starting to take too long.

Of course, I’m still fleshing out ideas for new talents as well. I’m expecting to shift my focus to them toward the end of next week.