![]() This allows us to give each level its own strongly defined identity. These are defined by a handful of parameters, mainly the numbers of entrances and exits available and the room's purpose.Įach room also pertains to a specific biome: for instance rooms used in the prison aren’t reused in the sewers. ![]() ![]() As mentioned there are variations possible in the handmade tiles. A room designed to host a hidden treasure won’t be the same as another hosting a merchant, and both will be very different from the rooms designed around combat. In practice, each tile has a specific layout of platforms designed for a specific purpose. Here’s some examples of the CastleDB software we use to create the tiles: Then we hand design a bunch of level “tiles” chunks of carefully designed rooms with a certain amount of variations possible in each of them depending on their configuration. All of this never changes no matter the loaded variant ( seed) of the game. In short the overall world layout is fixed and designed by hand.Ģ. The overall design of the map of the island, how the different levels are interconnected, where the keys to unlock new paths for your future runs are located etc. First, we place the fixed elements, acting a bit like a frame in which the procedural generation can express itself. Learning from previous games, and after many trials, errors, adjustments and a stack of tweaking, we’ve got six steps that we hope will help you approach procedural generation with quality level design as the underpinning rule.ġ. And we had to do this while keeping a feeling of consistency between runs and levels. So to sum up, the challenge was to build a partially procedurally generated world to create a feeling of change and diversity, excellent replay value and difficulty which is based on the players reaction to an evolving situation rather than rote learning. While there is very little of that AID in the current version, we kept the underlying philosophy: building the level’s generation system around dramatic peaks and relaxing “breaks” to ensure an interesting game pacing and keep the player enthralled. Ah, nostalgy.Īt the time, we began to develop our own “AI Director”, adapted for Dead Cells. Have a look over here for the basic explanation of the concept, it’s really quite interesting.ĭead Cells was at first thought as a Tower Defense. In LFD, Valve designed the levels to be dynamically modified through its “AI Director” system. Unexpected right? Well, it’s something of a trace left over from “that time Dead Cells was a zombie tower defense game” but we definitely took some lessons from their underlying ideas. The first one is Faster Than Light, which we regard as a model when it comes to a game allying procedural generation with a well orchestrated plot and a very consistent universe. But to sum it up, they used a hybrid approach between procedural generation and handmade levels, giving them that consistent feeling while maintaining a lot of diversity.īefore we get into the technical details of how this hybrid approach is implemented in our game, I want to mention two other sources of inspiration for Dead Cells. You can find a brief explanation of how that works here, if you’re interested. Here, we’d like to thank the guys behind Spelunky, who came up with some interesting solutions to the same problem. Not satisfied with either full handcrafting or full procedural generation, we could feel that there was a way to find a middle ground that would work. In short it was illogical, chaotic and left you with no feeling of consistency or immersion in the world. While the core gameplay feeling was improved by the freshness of new enemy placement, the level design took a great big hit. Even better, we found that it fundamentally altered the feeling of the combat of the game, placing the emphasis on the player’s instincts and reflexes rather than relying on rote learning a level in order to progress. And it worked well, bringing more replay value, a significant improvement for a game with any type of permadeath mechanic.
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