Big City Life

A month has passed since our last post, but also a lot has happened and today we want to share with you one of the interesting additions that found their way into the game.

This time we designed a city-area, so Bob can have many exciting downtown adventures. As in earlier areas, this city’s layout is built by procedural generation, so it will change every time you visit it. That wasn’t enough variation for us, though. We want you to have a fresh experience each time you enter this area, so we went generator-ception:
Many of the houses in this city have an open door, so you can enter them. Whenever you enter one of the houses, a second generator will build a random interior layout for it.

The generator uses single-room templates, that are automatically scanned for connection points, and tries to put them next to each other in different combinations, so the connector of one room matches the connector of the next one. This proved to work very well given enough room templates and some tweaking of limitation rules for the generator, e.g. a minimum amount of rooms that need to be placed for the layout to be considered valid.

At this time we are content with the way the indoor layouts look, but in the future we might add many more templates for the generator to work with. Even now there are numerous possibilities for layouts, but every new template provides new interesting combinations. To make it worthwhile for you to enter these buildings, we plan to add breakable objects which might contain goodies and maybe even some more unique things to find.

See you downtown!