Poll about exploration: blocked passages, full realism, or game-ified buildings?

[x4000]

Poll time!  In the next developer diary I do, one of the things that I'll be talking about is my work on "dungeon" design.  But specifically one thing that I'm working on at the moment is floorplan design for buildings, and I've hit a small quandary that I'd like some feedback on.

Say that I'm modeling an office building or an apartment building.  You're talking about a lobby, maybe a cafeteria, maybe public bathrooms, maybe a supervisor's office on the ground floor.  Then you have stairwells, halls on each floor, and multiple individual tenant spaces on most floors.  Then in each tenant space you have multiple rooms, such as secondary bedrooms and a kitchen in the apartment; and in an office building you have a cubicle area, private offices, maybe a computer room, and a conference room at minimum.

What I recently finished up creating was a set of algorithms for creating houses of various sorts, apartment buildings, lodges, office buildings, and a few other kinds of buildings.  What I discovered upon completion was that some of these types -- apartment buildings and offices being two examples -- have massive numbers of rooms in them.  300+, in many cases.

This is very realistic, and the game engine can definitely handle it, but what I don't think it is is fun.  I don't want to spend 4 hours scouring all the private offices in a single office building.  This is one of those reasons why most hand-crafted (as opposed to procedural) games have so many perma-locked doors and collapsed roofs and such.  OR, why so many RPGs have "houses" that are just one room with no bathroom or bedroom or anything.  Or far too few beds for the people living there, etc, depending on the game.

So, what I'm trying to decide is what would be the most fun way to handle this and make buildings feel large without feeling overwhelmingly so.  

Option 1: I prefer passages that are blocked, making it seem like buildings are big without having them really be annoying.
I hate perma-locked doors, so it would probably be literal collapsed-rooms (or even whole collapsed floors), if I were to model the entire building as now but just strike out 2/3 or more of the rooms so that you get 50-100 rooms instead of 300+ in terms of the really massive buildings.  That would be in character with the tone and story of the game anyhow, and actually could lead to more interesting variances in the buildings in some ways by having to find ways to get around debris at times.  

Personally, I think I'm leaning this way, but the downside is that at one point in the past I had said "if you can see it in AVWW, you can go there."  And I want that to be true, and it technically could be true, but that's just not as fun as I thought when you're talking about every last stinking room in realistically-sized buildings.

Option 2: I prefer game-like buildings that are smaller than real-life buildings.
This is kind of like most Nintendo or Square games.  Their buildings are gamified and don't really resemble real buildings.  In AVWW's case, I think what I'd do would be to make it so that instead of having 1-3 halls per floor in an office building, it's always 1.  And instead of having 3-4 tenants per hall, it's probably just one.  And instead of having 4ish private offices per tenant, it's just 0-1.  And so on.

The problem is that this really starts feeling stripped-down pretty fast, and it reduces the amount of variance between buildings.  If there's always one hall per floor... well, there's only so much that can be done with that, and the opportunities for travel through side passages (ventilation ducts, etc) gets really reduced.  

This would keep to the letter of what I'd said before, though, in that "if you can see it in AVWW, you can go there."  But I think it kind of tramples the spirit of it more than option 1 does.

Option 3: I prefer all my buildings to be incredibly over-sized by game standards to match their real-life counterparts.
Technically, I could just have the buildings be fully massive.  However, I don't really think this is a good idea because people like me like to explore things to 100%, and if I am spending so long in one building the game is going to get un-fun pretty fast.  How interesting can exploring 80 private offices with not much in them be?  Or, on the converse side, how many goodies should we really be packing into private offices of all things?  The point of these buildings is that there is good stuff in there, but I think it's a lot more interesting to explore many different buildings of different sorts and decors rather than just spending insane amounts of time per individual building.



I'm pretty well leaning toward option 1, but I was curious what others thought.  Thanks, as always, for sharing!

[Ixiohm]

I voted for option 1.

I have to agree that permanently locked doors (or surfaces in Portal that for some strange reason won’t accept portals ) are really annoying. But i think it's fine as long as you don't seal of whole buildings (and as I understand it you have no intention to do that). The problem as I see it is when the player is faced with a flimsy wooden door but no apparent reason why he/she can’t enter. If your character would say something like "The room is collapsed " I think it would be okay, this may even be opened up for players to provide their own flavor text as to why an area can't be entered . Even better if you would make it visually apparent why an area can’t be entered into.

[x4000]

Yeah, my intent would be to have a doorway filled with literal rubble, I think.  I share your feelings on flimsy doors that you can't get through. 

[Ixiohm]

Sounds good

Any ETA on the next dev diary? Impatient as always 

[x4000]

Hopefully sometime next week, but we'll see.  Keith and I are each working on a dev diary plus video, so it's going to be a double-feature this next time.  And it's likely to be the last pair of them that we do in that sort of full fashion before we hit beta, though there will be some smaller posts, too.

Keith's is really intending to focus on the macrogame, and the various interfaces and what the game is like when you first start, etc.  So the video will be a longer gameplay-focused one.

Mine is intending to focus on exploration and combat tactics and so on, again with a longer gameplay-focused video to go with.

These are basically the two videos (and related diaries) that will attempt to answer the question "What's all the fuss about?" for players who don't yet see the point.  And for those that do, it's a lot of salient details, much moreso than in our prior trailer-like videos.  After these two videos, of course, the next task will be for Erik to try to get together a really kick-butt trailer sometime before beta.

In the meantime the big blocker is that we have to actually finish the work that we want to show in those videos!

[Ixiohm]

Tanks for the reply

I guessed this would be the last diary before beta, nice to hear that tings are coming together.
Sounds very interesting

Well then, I will let you get back to work  Good luck with the work remaining!

[x4000]

Thanks!

[Flatfingers]

There's an old "joke" about managers that goes something like this: Presented with two options, both of which have pros and cons, the typical manager will respond by saying, "Do both."

I guess my experience as a project manager is starting to get to me, because my reaction is "why not do all three of those things?"

In other words, something like a mix of 60% large/blocked buildings, 35% small buildings (to make content creation a little faster/easier as well as providing some building size contrast relief), and 5% large/complete buildings that can be "big" exploration experiences as a change of pace from the many relatively smaller "dungeons."

The design work to do all these instead of just one is a little larger, but it sounds like the base code (to do 300+ rooms) is pretty much in place to support that.

Thoughts?

[x4000]

Yeah, I always liked that joke.

But, one thing to bear in mind is that building size also is inherently varied: so houses or small outbuildings are, well, small.  And they're all over the place.  But when I go into a big building, the question is how much bigger it seems.

In terms of making big buildings be artificially game-style smaller, that's something that is all-or-nothing in my view.  Either everything works that way, and that's just how the buildings in this universe are presented, or else if you have a few of them that are that way those ones seem really odd and out of place.

In terms of making it so that the amount of destruction varies, that's also something that I'm definitely doing in my implementation of option #1.  It's coming out pretty interestingly.

I guess if there are some players that want no-destruction buildings that are completely intact and utterly massive, I could make some sort of server option or game command for turning that on.  I don't think it would be very fun, but that's just me, and at the moment I can't think of any reasons that would be a ton more work. 

[x4000]

Oh, interestingly -- 300+ rooms is actually at the lower end of the big-building spectrum, I'm finding.  I was getting some hotels with 1100-1300 rooms in them.    And those were still only like 5 story apartment buildings.  My auto-destruction code is cutting them all down to pretty much under 100 rooms, and most are more like 20-50 rooms on average now.  But a cheat or server option to turn off the auto-destruction would certainly be possible.

[dumpsterKEEPER]

I voted for option 1 as well, although I really like the idea of variable destruction. It seems like it would be fun to come across some buildings that are almost completely intact, while others are almost completely collapsed. Combined with the variable building size, I'd think that would provide a lot of variety with not knowing exactly what to expect until you get inside the building.

[Flatfingers]

This is just personal taste, but to encounter somewhere between 1-5% buildings with 300-1000 undestroyed rooms sounds like fun to me.

Most building encounters would be brief breaks from exterior/cave action (it appears). To have a few very large buildings would (for those who want it) be a distinctive challenge after which outdoor adventures would seem fresh again.

Also, wouldn't the typical "evil overlord" lair need to be a fairly large and relatively functional installation? Or are those already a separate/unique building type?

Incidentally, a few very large structures in a typical RPG would usually be implemented as hand-crafted setpieces, with unique items serving a major sub-plot of the overall story. That's not possible with procedural content generation, though... or is it?

[x4000]

In terms of having some very large buildings -- including overlord keeps -- that's definitely a thing.  We may do some buildings that are functionally infinite, too, but I'm not 100% sure on that.  Sky tower sorts of things, we'll see; it's an idea that Keith and I have talked about for a long time with this project, but I haven't put it in yet.

In terms of the amount and kind of destruction (and whether that exists at all), that's really something that also will vary by building type.  So things like overlord keeps wouldn't be so filled with collapsed sections... probably.  At any rate, whether they have them or not, they'd be really much larger than just some random apartment building that you can go into.

[c4sc4]

From what I understand about the plot of the game, option 1 seems to make sense, if you have all of these mostly abandoned buildings, it seems like it would makes sense for them to be damaged and run down.

On the topic of buildings, will there be a way to identify what areas you've already explored?

[x4000]

From what I understand about the plot of the game, option 1 seems to make sense, if you have all of these mostly abandoned buildings, it seems like it would makes sense for them to be damaged and run down.

Yep, exactly.

On the topic of buildings, will there be a way to identify what areas you've already explored?

Yes, in-game any entrances show on the minimap as green when you (or another player) have been through them or red when you have not.  You can also leave magical markers for yourself if you want to, though in the main that should not be too important.  We're also considering several kinds of larger-than-a-chunk-map, smaller-than-the-world-map maps.

Right now my best guess is that there will be four levels of map, but we'll see: world map (which you've seen); chunk map (which is just the minimap scaled up, literally); dungeon map (showing how all the chunks in the current "dungeon" fit together -- even exteriors are considered a dungeon in this sense, but more on that next diary for the most part); and then region map (showing how all the dungeons in the region fit together -- exterior dungeon, dungeon for each building, and all the underground dungeons that might be daisy-chained together).

You can already see where you've been before on the world map, but my expectation is that we'll build something similar color-coding-wise in the region and dungeon maps.  Though "map" is not a really very good term for the dungeon maps in particular... really "graph" is more appropriate.  Since the maps would have to be three dimensional and quite twisty and impossible to read, it instead simplifies it into a simpler-to-understand graph of chunk connections.