You can find a brief explanation of how that works here, if you’re interested. Here, we’d like to thank the guys behind Spelunky, who came up with some interesting solutions to the same problem. Not satisfied with either full handcrafting or full procedural generation, we could feel that there was a way to find a middle ground that would work. In short it was illogical, chaotic and left you with no feeling of consistency or immersion in the world. While the core gameplay feeling was improved by the freshness of new enemy placement, the level design took a great big hit. Even better, we found that it fundamentally altered the feeling of the combat of the game, placing the emphasis on the player’s instincts and reflexes rather than relying on rote learning a level in order to progress. In light of this, it seemed like an obvious choice to at least build a prototype to test out the idea for Dead Cells.Īnd it worked well, bringing more replay value, a significant improvement for a game with any type of permadeath mechanic. On top of this, great use of procedural generation was being shown off by a bunch of critically and commercially successful games: Isaac, Minecraft, Starbound, etc. Before Dead Cells, we had already done quite a lot of browser games, most of them involving randomized elements and procedural generation so we were already quite familiar with the core concepts of procedural generation. Unfortunately, we quickly realised that we wouldn’t have the time to do it properly, considering the modest size of our team.įrom there, we knew we had to find alternatives. If you’re more a video guy, we also released a “lighter” version (still rather technical (read “boring”) though) of this dev diary on youtube.īefore looking at the how of the matter, let’s discuss the why, the reasons we chose to involve procedural generation in a genre known for painstaking level design.Īt first, about two years ago when we began to design and build a prototype for Dead Cells, we went for the traditional, handmade way of doing things. So we’d like to acknowledge these concerns and take a deep dive into how we’re planning to bring rogue-lite re-playability to a metroidvania. This is particularly obvious when talking about a genre that relies on meticulous level design at its core. After recent high profile procedural generation controversies, we can’t blame people for being sceptical. This article was originally posted on Gamasutra.ĭuring my time at Motion Twin, I’m was the Lead Designer on Dead Cells, a procedurally generated Metroidvania.Īs you would expect, questions about the quality of our procedural generation pop up very regularly, with both players and other devs.
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