Revisiting randomness
My recent work on SuperMegaMega has revolved around figuring out a lot of the desired game play and story.
Part of that process has led me back to considering procedural generation again.
I want to have a game that won’t require massive play sessions but is still appealing each time it’s played. The sense of progression is also important.
For examples of this I have been playing a lot of the recent roguelike evolutions that have become popular.
Some of them use random content in a way that is still very controlled. For example “The Binding of Isaac” uses a large set of hand made rooms (over 1000) that are chosen from as building blocks for the larger level layouts. “Rogue Legacy” does a similar thing too whilst Spelunky uses a more fine-grained version but it’s essentially the same idea.
So now SMM is using this pattern with its own twist. Pre made rooms and structures give more control over the player experience. The main restriction is all the rooms are based around a cylindrical structure. As long as there are a shit load of variants to select from it will seem very random. Just need to make sure the quality level is maintained over the entire set of rooms.
The actual gaming loop is currently being experimented with. So far leaning towards using a permadeath system with unlockable weapons and events. Don’t really know what will work until I get some more play testing done!
Lots of enemies,weapons,items and levels to make!
Also, my new phone is awesome! Note3 ftw
-Ryan