The Iron Oath Update #29

The February update for Curious Panda’s turn-based RPG The Iron Oath is all about the game’s dungeon layouts and how they’re created. The original idea was to generate the dungeons on the fly, but now it looks like the developers will be going with a more hand-crafted approach but with a certain degree of randomness thrown in for good measure. A bit more on that:

Hey everyone, we’re back with another monthly update and today we’re going to talk about how our dungeon layouts are created. We originally had been using a system that created layouts dynamically when entering a dungeon, but we’ve recently decided to go with a more hand-crafted approach so we have a little more control over everything. Here’s an example of what creating a layout looks like from our end.(note this isn’t an actual layout that will be used, it was more of a “stress-test” to make sure everything functioned properly despite some awkward placement!)

Since the mapping part is fairly quick and easy, our plan is to make hundreds of layouts for every environment, making it be extremely unlikely to ever get a repeat.

Each box on the grid corresponds to a specific tile for that environment. All the tiles transition seamlessly into one another(with the exception of isolated rooms) and we can place them in any fashion we want. The sewer tileset below is comprised of 21 pieces at the moment. We’ll add a few more down the road but it’s functional enough for now!

Each tile also has a number of prefabs within Unity that are decorated in various ways with props. Based on the mission and enemies you will be facing, the game will choose a prefab that matches the theme.

Finally, things such as obstacles or traps(also influenced by the enemies you will face – traps in particular) that occupy hexes will be randomly placed upon entering the dungeon. We’re hoping all of this will result in a good amount of replayability for every environment!

We’re continuing to work towards our next demo phase and are getting fairly close. We also have a couple new additions to combat that we will touch on in the next update. Hope you all have a great weekend and we thank you for your continued support! 🙂