Gameplay Week
I’m expecting this to be a shorter blog post this week (writing this line before writing the post itself) as I’ve sort of rounded off most of the work on the floor generator and started to implement some of the early gameplay mechanics. First, lets go over what’s changed about the dungeon generator and what’s left to do.
The main feature added to the generator this week is the system for spawning objectives. Originally, I was planning to handle objectives, items, NPCs, enemies, and anything else that needed to be spawned in the dungeon in an all-encompassing “point of interest” system. However, after having the slight redesign of the objectives system, I realized that I really needed to separate objectives and the rest of the points of interest. The reason for this is for the quota to work, we need to make sure a certain number of objectives actually spawn in the level, ideally way more than the players need to meet quota. This means that objectives need to be spawned first in order to make sure they can meet that quota. Additionally, I wanted to decide what objectives go where depending on the tile set of the current section, but for the rest of the points of interest, I don’t really care where they spawn. This poses a problem where the objectives want to clear the viable point of interest array each section but the other points of interest still need them when the floor is complete. These reasons combined lead to me splitting points of interest into “objectives” and “miscellaneous spawns”. These both have been added to the room base class and function in a similar way to the exits in the generator — each of these folders contains several arrows that act as spawn transforms for anything I might want to spawn there. There’s still some more work to do on this system — for example, it doesn’t quite work properly for multi-section floors yet, though I know how to fix it — but it’s already functioning at spawning a placeholder objective I’ve made!
An example of one of the rooms in the Blueprint editor — blue arrows are for objectives, orange arrows are for everything else
The same room, in play mode, having spawned an objective in the appropriate spot
You might notice, there’s quite a bit of other stuff to see in that second image that’s new. Lets get into it!
First, you may notice the circular bar in the top left of the screen. This is the player’s stamina bar! The specific numbers of this system are still subject to change, but the player can sprint, using up their stamina. If they run out of stamina, they are forced to stop running and don’t regenerate stamina for a few seconds. In the top right corner, you’ll see the debug widget. The intent is for this widget to help me out with debugging both now while I’m working on this first prototype as well as in a few months when I’m hoping to start playtesting. The idea is if someone sends me a screenshot or a video of gameplay, I’ll be able to see the important information about the level easily. I also intend to include some kind of game version information here once that becomes relevant. As you can see there, this information includes a seed. This is because in the past week, I found out it’s incredibly easy to include a seed system in Unreal Engine because basically all the work is already done. it was as simple as setting up a function to initialize the random stream then just change every random node to a random from stream node. The final new widget you can see on the screen here is the objective quota widget. This is a bar that fills up whenever a player completes an objective somewhere in the level. Once full, it will indicate to the players that they should return to the elevator. It only appears once the elevator doors open and disappears as soon as they close.
The objective bar, partially filled
The objective bar, telling the players to return to the elevator
With this feature, technically the game is a game! It’s not a very fun game — there’s no enemies, no items, no health, and only 1 objective that takes a single button press to complete — but the bones of the game are there. You may have also noticed in the image above, doorways have doors now! Whenever a room successfully spawns on an exit or a pair of exits choose to open, the parent exit (either the room spawned off of or the older room in a pair) will be added to an array. At the end of the generation, the generator spawns a door on each of those exits! While there’s only 1 door right now, the system is set up so that each section can specify an array of possible doors to spawn all with their own unique behavior, looks, and requirements to open.
You may also notice in that video that there’s now an interaction widget! Before adding objectives and doors, I had a placeholder interaction system that only pulled the elevator lever. Once it came to the point where I needed to interact with more things, it was time to add a proper system. Before, I was planning to use an interface to do interaction. However, this week I decided to handle interaction through an interactable base class. This allows me to have a variable for interact messages, whether or not the interactable is available, and other variables that might be wanted across multiple different types of interactable objects. I also set up a new collision channel for interaction. This way, I can set particular parts of an interactable to be the interaction point without having to check for tags or something like that. To make it so you can’t interact with something through walls, however, once an interactable is found, another ray cast is done back at the player on the visibility channel to make sure they can actually see it before allowing them to find the interactable as a valid target. Interactables also keep track of every player currently looking at it, primarily so it can update widgets if necessary. Finally, a few small updates have been made in various parts of the game.
The lever in the elevator has gotten a bit of a facelift, including 3 lights for the emergency departure system, which will be implemented down the line.
The elevator as a whole has also been improved slightly. There are now some blinking lights at the top of the door — only pointing downwards, of course. In addition to that, there’s a couple new sounds near the end of the elevator sequence when the doors open.
This coming week, I’m hoping to come up with a handful of actually interesting objectives to do, implement a health system, traps, and possibly a basic enemy. Before I can get any enemies in the game, I do need to do some research into how navigation meshes work in procedural levels, however. Hopefully I’ll have some good news to share on that front next week!
