Progress Report: Dungeon Overhaul

First a short announcement. I'll be uploading a demo/public version for the game this Saturday, assuming nothing breaks in the subscriber version. It will contain all the content up to the subscriber version, but the gameplay area will be limited. If you want to play on the older, yet unlimited version, make sure to download 1.3.3, since that version will be removed.

New Dungeons

It has been 285 days since the dungeon layout was updated. Those who are here for that long will know that before dungeons were just corridors. The dungeons were then changed to be rectangles. For more detail see https://madodev.itch.io/lewdest-dungeon/devlog/640113/progress-report-dungeon-re... However, it's time to overhaul these dungeons once more, and give each region a bit more personality. Below I'll show the minimap of a randomly generated dungeon of each region.

Forests are still rectangles, but the start and end are no longer on opposite corners. Instead they are randomly positioned on the short side of the rectangle. You know, as if you're moving through a strip of forest.

Caverns are now circular and the start and end are randomly positioned in this circle (but at least a set amount of tiles away from eachother).

Ruins have a cross shape with holes in the middle, forcing you to choose between multiple paths.

Swamps have a zig-zag shape:

Ans labs consist of multiple floors:

The Importance of Tooling

You may think that it's quite strange that the dungeons stayed barebones for so long. They were programmed to be easily expandable, and the positions of start and end were always meant to be placeholders. There's actually a good reason for this. Changing them, and testing those changes was horribly inefficient. The dungeon layouts were programmed before I created the Data Editor in the game. So any changes to dungeons would have to be made in Excel -> converted to csv -> uploaded in the game -> tested by finding the dungeon and playing through it. Not to mention that any typos would require me to do it again.

Now however, I was able to make that nifty tool you see above. Adding a line to the layout code immediately shows me the results. In case of bugs (and there were quite some) I can quickly regenerate the same dungeon after applying fixes. I can rapidly create multiple dungeons to check whether everything works, even including Curio rooms. Any changes then get automatically applied to the game data. In short it makes the whole process extremely fast. This whole overhaul, including creating the tooling, took less than a week and is now reusable. 

So yeah, tooling is great. If I were to start over I would make a lot more of these. In fact, I'm working on an animation tool to rework the combat/overworld puppets for the next game.  Unfortunately it's a bit too early to showcase it.

Changelog

Major:

• Dungeon layout overhaul, see above.

Minor:

• If analytics are enabled, the game will automatically check whether a newer version is available, this way you won't miss hotfixes.
• The durability bar now has light colored dividers to show the durability of inidividual items.
• New textures for Boots of Strength, Boots of Speed, Mind Scrambler, Mind Blanker, Overcharge Visor, Stylish Heels, and Boots of Kicking, thanks Jimmy G!
  
• New textures for the Belt of Denial, thanks Ridigan!
• New personalities for all missing personality combinations, thanks Princessity!
• Surgery panel has been streamlined.

Bugfixes:

• Ascension panel covered other church interactions.
• Signet rings could break, breaking all sorts of stuff.
• Completion gates for the Mechanist boss dungeon were broken.
• Grapples used the target's HP instead of the user's.
• Ignore_tokens didn't work when on quirks/equipment.
• Final boss could summon bosses, and its final stage was broken.
• The Sacrifical Altar in the ruins behaved as an Ornate Chest.
• Branding icon was inverted.
• There were no barks for the Bunny class in the guild.
• Has_item_in_guild and no_item_in_guild scripts didn't work for stacks of items

If you want early access to these changes (and a debug console), support me here:

PATREON | SUBSCRIBESTAR