Saturday 8 March 2014

Level themes - static or random?

One of the huge tasks in Kaduria are various level themes. As I mentioned earlier I gave up on trying to create a single engine to produce all level themes. I couldn't do it, it was out of my reach and also quite difficult to admit, since I'm such a genius.

But problems don't stop there. You still have to create themes that have the distinctive look, yet try to be as random as possible to increase replay value. It's a difficut task and I'm having problems even trying to create all themes in somewhat static form (always including some key elements).

This is a problem that gets harder if you want it. I could just let it go and create static themes and possibly even remove permadeath from the game. That way the player could complete each game and never have to run the first levels again and again. But removing permadeath would change the gameplay to more traditional RPG rather than roguelike, where permadeath is an essential feature, possibly even the most important of the key features.

Another possibility is create only few static themes and much more random type themes, or maybe select from couple of themes to get more variation in static themes as well.

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