Hi there,

another 62 days have passed since the last devlog and there is not that much to say this time.

The most exciting new thing is the new capsule art made by https://x.com/ggtfimz!

Levels

Apart from that, most of my time sank into reworking the dungeon generation. It began with reverse engineering old algorithms using marching squares. This resulted in some navmesh problems, so i decided to go back to the square tile based approach but made it nicer. Now every dungeon uses 2.5x2.5m wall tiles as usual, but each is divided into 4 segments. Depending on its neighbours, each segment will be a different base mesh (edges, outward corners, inward corners, solid blocks when bordering nothing). This is obviously better than boring boxes, but still bland. In addition, each dungeon has a set of room types. Each room type has a set of possible "decorations" per wall segment. At this stage, almost any type of room per dungeon has the same decorations as it's still a work in progress. However, I've added a new dungeon (levels 9-12), that received some animated wall decorations, which initially resulted in huge fps drops (remember to stop animations for the hundreds of entities that are off screen!). In addition to looking nicer, these segments give some space to the square shaped navmeshes and thus reduce clipping when walking close to the walls, without the need of more complicated navmesh tiles.

Enemies

Some new enemies were made for the new area. It's primarily orcs, but there's also a new non-generic monster to be found. As orcs are basically just green humanoids, they got randomized equipment to create more diversity. The dwarf skeletons got the same treatment and got more variations to break up the monotony. Goblins will get that too in time, but they will need to wait, since there is so many other things to do.

Other stuff

Barely worthy of mentioning is some more dialogue, a few more items, more/better character animations (idle/walk stances differ when in town or in dungeon now!) and added staves as a new weapon type. A new companion is in the works too.

I'm sure there is lots of bugs hidden in this version, since a lot of stuff changed for the levels, which can affect almost anything. Too much time was spent for the procedural generation, so the other plans had to take a backseat.

Future plans

These remain pretty much the same as last time:

• Non-magic abilities for the player to learn (still need to figure out a sensible approach for this)
• Nicer rooms, more interactive things like chests
• More and better dialogue
• Quests
• More abilities for companions, finish new companion
• Probably performance optimizations