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Fantastic write-up. I was wondering about the map-gen - it was sufficiently challenging to explore and navigate without generating completely frustrating dead ends (such as ending up in one "prong" of the map only to find that the exit is on the other prong). Very interesting

Question: I can't speak to this with certainty, but I could have sworn that twice so far I've had maps (both cases it was the first level - chronologically, I mean, not LVL-1) where one of the data nodes was in an enclosed space only reachable via Burrow. One was a particularly memorable occasion because I tunneled into the room with the node and a patrol in it, had the Hunter follow me in, and then circled back around to the entrance I had made to get back out. I don't think I could have possibly missed an existing door if there had been one. Do you know anything about that?

It shoulddddd be the case that the validity checker will reject the map in the case you describe. I have seen cases where players think it’s inaccessible but it’s not.

  1. You can press buttons diagonally, and the validity checker will consider that to be ok. I should just make this not ok.
  2. The path can be very far, and feel impossible if you don’t have as much confidence as I do there will be doors where you need them along the way.

Or the validity checker could be broken! It was a hard bit of code to test in a hurry. I didn’t have time to build up nice test sets that I had pre validated. So it’s quite possible there are errors that my manual testing missed.

Thanks for reading!

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I found a VERY hard to hit button in my developer commentary here: https://youtu.be/mXRjvb0w1Yc?si=22sTrqlZxpV38Oxv&t=1202

It was ultimately accessible, but it looked like it might be impossible early in the run. Maybe this is something like what you encountered?

I don't think so, most likely it was a room accessible only via diagonal corner tiles that I missed.

Which, I'm torn about. My biggest issue with them is that it's often very hard to see if there's a corner entrance or not until you're looking at it squarely. So scouting them is a bit of a timesink.

Yeah I think that’s just bad map generation on my part. I switched the map validity checker to only use 4-way movement which I think will cause it to reject maps that REQUIRE diagonal movement to get to an objective. However I haven’t yet found a map that actually DOES require that, so I’m not certain it’s working yet. :D