Eldritch 2 is coming to Steam! Please wishlist it here.
I’m mostly continuing to focus on building dungeon rooms for the next several weeks. I finished the set of temple theme rooms for Innsmouth last weekend, which gives me confidence that I can build the remaining three themes (caves, docks, and boss themes) on the timeline I’d scheduled a couple of weeks ago.
I also took a couple of tech detours, revisiting loot distribution and implementing a proper map. I’ve written a bit about loot distribution before, but as I was building new dungeon rooms, I kept encountering cases where it seemed like there should be some loot to find but the distribution system was overconstrained and those opportunities were failing. I ended up adding a new “required spawner” flag which ensures that certain loot spawners will always be utilized even if they violate the intended total amount of loot in the map. It’s a bit of a hack, but I think it’s more important that certain rooms always have something good to find than it is to maintain a strict economy (especially in a single-player game).
The big map (or “maximap” as I call it, to distinguish it from the minimap on the HUD) is a feature which I’ve had for a few years as a dev tool but which had a few rendering bugs that were keeping it from being shippable. I got some feedback during playtests in March that a maximap was desired, so I finally tackled those bugs and made the maximap a proper player-facing feature. (I think there may be a separate issue with why a map feels necessary; levels are large and very twisty, and it can be difficult to navigate them by sight. But that was also true of the original Eldritch, and is sort of innate to the design, so… I’m not currently planning to solve that another way.)
The maximap is rendered the same as the minimap, but from a fixed perspective that is sized to encompass the whole level. Both the minimap and the maximap are actually just rendering the AI navmesh with some special shaders, because it already exists as a triangle mesh, and that saves me the trouble of building separate map assets.
I’ve been playing around with how much of the map should be visible at the start of the game; currently, the entire outdoor overworld is visible (including map markers for shops, banks, or other features), but dungeon rooms are not added to the map until they are visited. Feels like a good compromise that reveals the overall size and shape of a level without giving away any real secrets.