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Mutually Assured Generation

Mutually Assured Generation published on

This week ended up dedicated to the last phase of generation, placing places. And it really didn’t need to be.

You see my original plan to integrate zone generation was to simply place the single tile location inside the zone and then have roadway entrances lead to it. I figured in the future I could even place additional tiles around the zone to give visual indication of what the location contained. You can see an example of this here:

 

problemo3(ignore the caves, as they are debug markers of zone entrances)

From a player’s perspective, though, they don’t really see the zones. They see the roadways. And in cases like this, they get the misleading impression that the volcano leads directly to the swamp. But it doesn’t. So I wracked my head for viable solutions for most of the week (when I wasn’t fixing glitchy zone borders, anyway). And there aren’t any really:

  1. Make more expressive roadways (terrible visually, for artist, and for programmer).
  2. Don’t generate zones where the location cannot be the crossroads for every entrance (viable, but restrictive and slower).
  3. Just use the zones.

It’s the last one there that’s the final hope. It pretty much means we go all out and place the location objects throughout the entire zone, making it clear. This is an example of it using existing place objects:

example2

Naturally in practice this would mean having a variety of graves on each tile in a graveyard, or to place a variety of houses in a town zone, etc. Sew has gone on to suggest that we’d replace difficulty terrain types (lava, snow, grass, etc) with zone tile types (dead earth for a graveyard, etc) to make the connections stand out. But before we commit that far, we want to actually test out the node system and see if it’s worth using. So that’s where my goal is, marching onward to largely use the old stuff while altering the movement system to the node stuff. And terribly behind schedule.

There’s just one last task in generation. Dungeon placement. The original plan was to just place dungeons down in areas with a single connection and then mark them as high priority for future generation (hence creating areas that they blockade). This system, however, doesn’t work very well with the shape system in place since it can generate several zones at once for a single shape, eating up the zone budget dramatically. So now I’m pondering some sort of system that looks for choke points and places dungeons on them. I just want to be done with generation.