showdown throwdown update

stop trying to make it good and focus on making it exist, you can make it good later.

so i'm making pretty good progress, there are a lot of high level resources for procedural generation but none that are really down and in the dirt, so i'm writing this algo but i am sure there is a better way to do it. i started out making dungeons that look like this:

procgen level 1

if i was working on the top down shooter i have planned out but not started, this would work really well. it is doing what i asked it to do, so i called it a win. but i need some things to always spawn. i need six spawn rooms for players, i need them to be opposite of each other and i need them to be evenly spaced.

i also need a boss room in the middle, i want it to have some variation (still in the middle but it could be at the top, center or the bottom). so i added some logic to handle that, and now my dungeons are looking a lot closer to something i can use:

procgen level v2

this is a lot closer to what i need, now i have a few new problems i need to address.

1: there are no platforms.

this is a pretty big problem for a platformer, this also means there is no way for players to navigate the long vertical corridors that connect rooms. i will need to generate some platforms in some way so that players can at least get around when they spawn in.

2: room distribution is not even

this is a competitive game so the room layout needs to be fair, currently the map can favor one side over the other: spawning lots of enemy rooms on one side and a straight shot to the boss room on the other. i think if i generate half the dungeon and then mirror it that can make the levels a lot more fair.

3: no seeded generation

i want to be able to send out a seed once a week that generates the same dungeon for each instance of the game. this means everybody plays the same map for a week then when i generate a new one everybody plays that map. this will help keep the game fresh and give people new what i call "drama points". places in the map where pvp combat will happen.

forward always, well, forward most of the time.

i am going to work on fixing all these today, then i will move on to generating locked doors and adding in the elite enemy rooms (who will drop keys). i tried some networking stuff but i think i need to work backwards. by backwards i mean for my workflow. usually i start with a test level, then do the character and some enemies so i can test features. once i have all that working i go through working as the player would play the game: start making the studio card scene, then the main menu, then any sub menus or anything, then the game loop, then the end of the loop and what happens at a game over.

for this i'm doing my first phase the same (test level/enemies/character) but for the rest i'll need to work backwards. get the players to be able to spawn, get a character select screen working, then a room list, then the main menu etc.