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Game News Druidstone to use randomly arranged handmade maps, not pure procedural generation

Infinitron

I post news
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Tags: Ctrl Alt Ninja; Druidstone: The Secret of the Menhir Forest

Druidstone, the top-down turn-based tactical thingie from the former Grimrock devs at Ctrl Alt Ninja, has a new development update (not sure if it's an official "dev update", but whatever). It addresses what is probably the game's most contentious feature - its use of procedural generation. Apparently, the developers were genuinely surprised by people's unhappiness with this. The update explains that the game's individual "rooms" will be handmade, and the procedural generation will only determine how they're arranged on the grid:

To our surprise, there has been some heated discussion about Druidstone being procedural. We didn’t really expect that but in hindsight it’s easy to see that we should have communicated more clearly what it means when we say Druidstone has procedurally generated content. Otherwise it’s way too easy to get the wrong idea.

So let’s talk about proceduralism in Druidstone. Procedural games can be roughly split in the following categories:

1. Fully procedural games like Minecraft, Dwarf Fortress and No Man’s Sky, which generate the whole world procedurally. Most of them have sandbox type of gameplay.

2. Procedural games with some predefined content. For example, most roguelikes have special rooms that are handmade (often called “vaults” in roguelike jargon).

3. Games with handmade, predefined content in randomized order. E.g. FTL has designed encounters but their order is randomized and Binding of Isaac has handmade rooms whose order is also randomized.

So, which category does Druidstone fall into? Druidstone has a story that unfolds as your progress in the game, so option 1 would not work. Telling a predefined story in a fully procedural generated world would be almost impossible. Technically options 2 and 3 would both work but in the end we picked option 3 because it just fits better into the game design and is just so much easier to accomplish.

What that means in practice is that the world of Druidstone is split into areas that are “randomly” connected. An area could be almost anything, a room in a dungeon, a forest meadow, a graveyard, an encounter with a NPC, you name it. Internally we call them all “rooms” even though they may not resemble a real room at all. Basically each room is a handcrafted mini-level in itself, and can have enemies, traps, NPCs, etc. Rooms are picked from a large pool of rooms, so that there are more rooms than fits into a single playthrough.

Technically each room is defined by a piece of Lua code, so the system has a lot of flexibility. With Lua it’s easy to have some randomly varying content in the rooms as well, if we want to. For example, the enemies or items in the room may be randomly determined. We try to keep the rooms relatively small to maximize the potential of surprising room combinations.

The rooms are essentially 2D grids (tactical battles are just so much better on a grid), so it’s only natural that the rooms themselves are connected on a grid. We really like our grids!

In addition to these randomly chosen rooms there are special key encounter rooms that can only appear in predetermined points in the game. The key encounters usually advance the story but they may also be some cool moments or bad-ass boss fights.

So there you have it! If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask in the comments section. Until next time!
So there you go. Did my prediction come true? Close enough!
 

CryptRat

Arcane
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Sep 10, 2014
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I'm getting more and more interested in the game.
They didn't explain how deaths work now that the game is party-based, but assuming the game still has some form of reincarnation in a "new world" when you die, handcrafted and randomly placed rooms may indeed be a very good way to go.
 

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