I’ve been working heavily on the overworld map implementation and it’s almost at a point where I can show it off and that’ll probably be done in the next dev diary.
Without spoiling too much, the game map i shared last time is now in game(with a few tweaks) along with procedually generated maps for each individual tile. The maps themselves felt quite barren so I also added in 20 new animals, all with their own individual AI. More on this next time though!
With the overworld map implemented, I now basically had a two separate games. One was the original dungeon crawler with different levels for you to progress through and then one was a massive overworld map that you could explore but without any sense of progression or anything in it. I had the code left from the original dungeon and I decided to refuse a lot of this to form the basis of my cave generations.
The game is quite unique in its setting and yet I still want to capture a lot of what makes traditional roguelikes fun and a lot of the time that is proc gen dungeon crawling. I thought the best place to showcase this is was in the various cave networks across the setting of 16th century Latin America. I’ve got plans for temples and other dungeon-esque locations to be added in the future but my existing code was not really intended for thay and so caves were chosen.
The implementation of this was actually pretty easy however I kept running into a bug where it would spawn the player into a wall when generating the dungeons. To get around this, I essentially creating a staging area, the cave entrance, which allowed me to seamlessly transition from overworld to cave entrance to then the different cave levels.
Perfect, so that was now working but when you are 15 levels deep in a cave and you’ve reached the end of it and need to get out, it’s pretty boring to have to walk all the way back up. Most other games would have some type of spell or technology you can use to teleport yourself back to the surface but there isn’t really anything like that in my games setting and so I had to think of something else.
I’ve always like the way caves of qud handles this. Sure you can find technology that teleports you but you can also just press the stairs up button and your character will make their way there and so I decided to add this. In my head I thought this would be quite simple, simply adapt the logic of my existing stairsup action to just include a simple path find of the player to the nearest stairs.
Wrong.
One thing I think gamers often take for granted is how so many systems are interlinked. You see people online always say “just add this” or “it must be so simple to do this” whereas I’ve found a lot of the time it is extremely difficult or more importantly a massive amount of time to do.
As soon as I implemented it, I realised the player would just teleport past enemies. So I had to change the enemy logic to reflect this, then I realised there is no movement for the player outside of the keyboard and so I had to add an auto move ai for the player to follow, but then the player was registering as its only hostile ai and wouldn’t move, so I changed that logic. Then the player would not go upstairs because it hadn’t cleared an enemy alert from the previous level, so I had to change that. Then certain enemies would not register as being hostile and well you get the picture.
I think that this is what makes game development so difficult and yet so fun. I love figuring these out and I often lie in bed thinking of how I can fix a problem and then it hits me and I go and fix it, much to annoyance of my wife.
The good news is, the auto move now works perfectly and even though I had intended it solely to be used for finding the nearest stairs up, I have now used it to expand mouse support and I am now at a point where 80% of the game can be played with just the mouse. I know a lot of traditional roguelike lovers enjoy keyboard only and so I’ve kept both in so that everyone can enjoy it!
That’s it for now. I’ve made a ton of progress recently and so the dev diaries should be coming in faster than usual.
For now, I’ll leave you with an animation of the auto walk! (All visuals subject to change)
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