-Procedurally generated battlefields

Started implementing some “procedural generation” elements to the game. They’re very basic right now, using different groups of tiles stored in XML fields and combining them to create a symmetrical field. Right now there are only broken tiles (which you can’t move onto) and spikes (which damage you a tiny bit if you move onto them). I plan on adding more tile types depending on what world the current player is in.

One of the ways I plan on making this process more procedural by introducing logic based on types of enemies that take advantage of different tile types.

The current plan is for there to be 6+ worlds, each with different environments and sets of enemies. The player will start in a random world, but will be able to influence what world they go into next. Each world will get more difficult than the one before it by changing enemy patterns and stats. This way players can have some choices about which enemies/worlds they want to deal with early and which to face the hard/lategame versions of. Each world will have at least one unique boss that most will also different difficulty levels.

I’m currently trying to write up all the different enemies and their attacks for the 6+ worlds. Lots of brainstorming going on. Also going to have to draw up all these guys. Most of the mechanics are in place so far so most of what is left is actually creating these guys.

I ended up trashing thew puzzle artifact idea that you get to add to every level. It was way too complicated and not fun... Instead I’m going with something more like the energy system in FTL, but you’ll only be able to change it in between battles. This will allow the player to move around stats a bit, hopefully in a meaningful way.

Some of these modifiable stats include: 

• armor
• weapon damage
• spell damage
• mana
• mana regen
• move speed

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Retro:

Oof okay, so players hate spiked tiles! I mean it's almost unavoidable to go over them, so even having just one feels pretty bad, since enemy attack patterns are so intense. It's a bad idea to ever force the player to take damage (unless its plot related?)! Spiked tiles may be in the full game in extra hard modes though! I actually didn't end up going with sets of Ls and Squares for the tile patterns. It's still in the code, but having random cracked tiles and rocks instead seemed to work just fine.  More tile types haven't been added yet (except cracked ones which break when you move off of them) but they are still in the plans.

The plans for worlds has changed a bit, there are going to be 4 different environments with 8 worlds/bosses. We swapped back and forth between random world order and structured world orders.. It turned out making different difficulties of the same enemy was not only lots of fun, but also very easy to do! So we decided to keep random world order with increasing difficulties for enemies.

I had a Tetris/Super Puzzle Fighter system in place for stat upgrades.. it was so clunky I ended up removing stat upgrades completely. Let the Artifacts(items) do the talking there. The modifiable stats will only be influenced by starting character and artifacts.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you guys think about different tilefields!