Mountains of snow

I find myself again at the snow top. This level theme requires some new routines, but if I keep myself calm I can possibly create a brief sketch for each level theme per week or two. Anything new made in a theme can be used later and most of the time consuming stuff is creating things that don't yet exist.

When most level themes of Kaduria are quite static with some random structures it has made me think what I'm actually trying to do. It's like Teemu, I can't call it a roguelike. It's too static and more like adventure game. Still it has permadeath which even I find annoying. The interesting thing is that some people like the challenge permadeath is creating. Even when the game design is poor and often your character dies in a random situation which could not be avoided. This has made possible to create games that have quite poor game design, but some people still like them. ADOM is a great example. It never was really good as a game, but its difficulty became a feature some hard core players like anyway.

I know it's funny when you remember my strict opinion about what a roguelike should be, but I have to think about removing permadeath from Kaduria. I want to create a large game world and more static content. It's not good combined with permadeath. I think pure roguelikes should have relatively small game world and almost completely random level generation. However Kaduria will most likely be a fusion of "static" RPG and a roguelike. Maybe it could be a good idea to include an iron man mode with permadeath for hard core players.

Caverns of doom

In the next phase caverns or more like passages connecting them went through everything else as was expected. Passages wider than 1 tile were removed temporarily, since there is no routine to check rooms with the ellipse routine drawing passages. It's a minor problem to be fixed later.

Caverns itself were too small for some reason. Fixed that with proper data for the level theme. That way I can control the size on each level theme if needed.

Both actual rooms and caverns are separate "layers" so it's possible that sometimes those two don't have a connection between them. It's rare, but possible. I'm going to check that with flood fill and then searching a place where a corridor can be made without breaking anything else.

When looking at cavern interior generation I started to think too much again. There are 11 different interiors now and some of them are unfinished, but I realized that I can and should leave some of them to do later, namely those I don't need right now in this level theme. It may be even possible that caverns can't do something I need later and I have to create another more specific routine for that task.

Next I'm going to add small rooms which is the last feature for this level theme. After that I'm going to move on next level theme. The idea of the new plan is first create the physical structure of each level theme and only then add details.