Eldritch 2 is coming to Steam! Please wishlist it here.
I’m taking today off, so I don’t have any real updates, but I thought I’d write a bit about how I build each dungeon room in Eldritch 2. I’ve got about 30 rooms left to build for Innsmouth, and this is the process for each. On a good day, it takes me maybe 20-30 minutes to concept, build, and test each one.
Each room fills a 12m x 12m x 8m space, just like in the original Eldritch. So I load up the in-game editor, plug in those numbers, and see a blank space like this:
Each room has to fit into the generated dungeon according to its basic shape. In this case, I’m building a room with a “NE” configuration: portals/exits to the north and east. Basically, an L-shaped room. So I’ll tag those sides as portals, and block in the basic geometry of the room.
Now comes the fun part: making this an interesting space, distinguishable from any other NE configuration. My basic concept for this room is to have a little interior chamber set into the back corner, where the player might find some good loot. So I block out the geometry, using my editor’s suite of convex primitives:
Then I place entity spawners and sublevel generators. Spawners are opportunities for something to be created in the world, and there are rules that determine which ones are actually used in order to manage the overall population and distribution of enemies and loot in each dungeon. So I’ll put some loot spawners and enemy spawners in here, and those might be used when the dungeon is generated, or this room might end up being empty. (Some features like doors or torch sconces are always generated, but are still represented as spawners in the level editor, because they could be managed by other rules.)
There’s a small sublevel generator at the back of this room (the cyan box in the screenshot above). This is some “whitespace” in the room, where random junk can be generated at runtime from even smaller level modules, to provide a little bit of variety when this room is used multiple times in a dungeon.
The last step is to draw the navmesh. I do this by hand, using some custom tools that make it quick and easy to draw triangles between the vertices of the convex geometry. Most modern games generate their navmesh automatically, and that’s probably the best choice in most cases; but the simplicity of the geometry in my games makes it very easy to do by hand, and I enjoy having precise control of the shape of it.
And then I save the room file, add it to the manifest of rooms that the dungeon can use, and generate a new level to test it. In this case, it appeared in its mirrored form! Every room can be mirrored, to provide just a bit more variety. That’s a whole other complicated thing I might write about sometime.
But anyway, that’s the process of making a dungeon room for Eldritch 2. Now I just gotta do that 30 or so more times, and the first dungeon will be finished!