Frayed Knights - The Princess is in Another Castle

The Rampant Coyote has another post on his website about his RPG game Frayed Knights, and dungeon design in the games sequel Frayed Knights II.

In development of Frayed Knights 1: The Skull of S’makh-Daon, a lot of the time and effort in the latter stages of the project was devoted to dealing with scaling the game. A lot of the practices which worked okay for one or two dungeons didn’t scale well to making two dozen locations. There was a lot of “butt in chair” work which would have been made much easier with better tools – especially with the ease of making mistakes. A lot of the bugs in the testing process came down to hard-to-find mistakes that came from trying to do things like manually place and configure every door in a dungeon. One cut-and-paste error in the tedious process, and you could end up with a bug that might take hours to find and fix.

In early development of Frayed Knights 2, I spent a lot of time building some editing tools, thinking they would solve this problem.  I spent months making an ugly but usable editor, with some really cool ideas (well, in my mind, anyway) to make this process faster, easier and less error-prone. I created an editor that let me draw out the dungeons in 2D, like I’d do on graph paper for dice-and-paper gaming, but with some great 3D layering with slopes, stairs, parts of levels crossing over each other with some decent visualization.

I was, and still am, pretty proud of the results. My intent was to create an “80%” solution – make it so that 80% of the level design could be massively simplified so we could devote the time to the most “interesting” 20%. It was a pretty good idea. I wrote a bunch of really cool code that would transform these designs from a 2D map into full-fledged 3D environments with features like ledges, slopes, waterways, and of course diagonal walls. I learned a lot about procedural object generation in Unity. The results were actually kinda cool looking.