Hi, dungeon-crawling fans!
It's time for a new project update! The last month has been filled with level design, programming, and optimizations. Early Access version 2.0 is currently scheduled for January. You can hear all about it in the latest video devlog:
As always you can find the transcript below!
Merry Christmas, a Happy New Year, and best wishes!
Michael
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Hi, dungeon-crawling fans!
It’s time for the last devlog of the year. Monomyth’s early access version has been out for two months and a lot of work has gone into fixing errors and preparing new content. The first major content patch “Echos in the Dark” is currently scheduled for January. In it players will continue their journey into the depths below Lysandria. So let’s take a look at it.
Most of the new content takes place in the mines and factories below the heartlands. The area has gone through some major revisions in the last month. In fact, it went far beyond the announced restructuring. While much of the assets and questlines are still intact, most of the area’s base geometry has been redone. The normal course through the area has been completely reorganized and many locations have been dropped or replaced. As a result the area is much more intuitive in its design, easier to navigate and much better integrated with the rest of the game. It is still a highly complex area to get lost in. During the design process there has also been a stronger focus on different types of encounters, so it will be interesting to see how people’s playstyle will adapt coming from the heartlands.
When I remade large parts of the mines I applied a slightly different design approach. The original version of this area had a rough vision, which was implemented in an ad-hoc fashion. This means the bigger picture was more or less clear and the details were filled in step by step during the implementation process. This led to some nice vistas but all in all the area was much too big, annoying to navigate and hard to optimize.
So, for the new version of the area I went back to Monomyth’s original area design principles. I have talked about these principles a few times in the past, but to refresh your memory, let's go over them once more.
Basically, Monomyth applies the design principles found in the earlier levels of Ultima Underworld, where an area is split into several sections, connected via a center-piece or a long hallway that makes it easier to quickly travel through the place.
You can see this principle applied in the heartland’s river system, respectively the main road between the Serpent’s Bastion and Lysandria.
Sections are then built from rooms, respectively encounter locations. Here I made some small adjustments. I introduced subsections which bundle thematically connected rooms together and make exact planning easier.
The mines have pretty much exactly the same scale as the heartlands, but due to the subsection driven design, the density of rooms is slightly higher.
You can, by the way, find similar design principles in various online dungeon crawlers. The only difference: These usually do not have any major connecting hallways, as such would probably introduce unwanted chokepoints on the map.
For Monomyth on the other hand, that’s a positive, as it helps you quickly navigating through the map while still retaining somewhat of a directed map flow.
Anyway, the mines still require a detail pass in several areas, a sound pass and some coding. All in all, I think the map should be ready during January.
But level design was not the only thing I did during the last month. I have also worked a bit on better tooling. As I have mentioned in an earlier update most of Monomyth’s dialogue trees are actually designed and written in a simple table which is transformed into a struct by a Python script.
I finally found some time and started implementing a dialogue tool, so I can properly write, edit, visualize and fix my dialogue trees in one environment. I hope to get that tool into a usable state this month, so it can speed up the writing and quest design process.
I have also worked on a few fixes, as well as some optimizations, which were already contained in a new patch released a few days ago.
So this is where we currently stand. As mentioned in the beginning, the content patch will likely be ready during January. Until then, I’ll keep you updated and see you soon!