4/16/19 – This is an idea I’ve had in a few forms for years. The idea is to make a game where the world is fluid and ever-changing until you manually lock down areas of interest so they become readily-navigable.
The first iteration was a Stencyl game I attempted, where you’d have a few platforms at different heights and widths. As a platform leaves screen width * 1.5, it would appear at the same distance in the direction the player was traveling, but with different size/shape and height. The intent was to then sprinkle in points of interest, creatures and loot to interact with, and making it so traveling in a direction would eventually allow the player to leave the “zone” they are in and enter a different “zone” with a different configuration of platforms. While I never managed to execute it, this was meant to be like an infinite-runner game expanded out into a roguelike platformer.
A second brief revisit to this was building up sections of rooms of different sizes, with standardized entry and exit points, which would have looked similar to the way Rogue Legacy builds its levels. Again, going enough rooms away from an area would cause it to reset and be remade with completely different contents, or similar rooms but everything in slightly different places and possibly being able to access things that you couldn’t the last time. Again, this was never completed to any demoable extent.
Now I’m revisiting it again, this time taking more of a “lost woods” from original The Legend of Zelda where players can keep going deeper into an area, but until they know or discover the right way through, just a couple screens of back-steps will return them to the zone they had left before. The idea is less that you have to zig and zag the right way to get through a zone, so much as learning which zones will transition into which other zones with enough travel.
Each zone is represented as an approximate “area”, and when the player leaves one zone’s area to enter another zone, the X and Y positions are remembered. If the player retreats from the zone they entered, no matter how far in any direction they went before making their definitive retreat, they return back to the X and Y coordinates of the previous area they left. This way, if you know that the area you’re locking down is about 5 screens up and left diagonally from where you just entered the adjacent zone, it is easy to return to that area.
Additionally, each area has at least one direction that never resolves, possibly a few until the ability is unlocked to traverse out of a zone in different ways. For example, if the player starts in a Forest, they may never see the actual treetops and canopy until they’ve gone East and discovered “climber’s gear” somewhere out in the Mountains. It could be that they can’t transition anywhere in the Mountains, except going deeper to explore and gather resources before backing out to the Forest again, which is only a few screens of travel back West from any point in the Mountain zone.
Progress is made by recording the world, by taking account of what and where everything is, and in doing so removing them from the random chaos that is otherwise seen when leaving and spatially revisiting the same place. Sections of areas that you want to preserve and be able to revisit can be locked in by recording it (character takes a photo, expends a sheet of paper and a bottle of ink, etc) and while you won’t immediately navigate back to that point when you re-enter the zone of origin, it is able to be rediscovered as-is if you manage to get to the approximate spatial location of where it used to be when it was recorded. Once enough connected sections have been recorded, they can start to establish more of the finite width of the zone, and then bridge into other zones, which will start to anchor down the concrete pathways between the zones.
Beyond that, layer any system you want on top of it. Platformer, birds-eye, space, bacterial goo mass, whatever. What you “lose” on “death” is up to whatever makes sense, too.
So extrapolating on the Forest and Mountains, I will build out a larger zone.
The forest only leads East to the Mountains, and that is only after interacting with someone or something indicating it is there.
The Mountains initially don’t lead anywhere, but the Climbing Gear can be found, which allows ascending to the Canopy in the Forest.
The Canopy is up in the forest, and requires a fair amount of ascending to get there. Along the way, a Grappling Hook will be discovered, which is required to get across some larger gaps. A couple of these gaps will need to be used as the gate to reinforce getting the grappling hook. Once there, heading East will lead to the Mountaintops, which are filled with gaps that require the grappling hook.
Descending from the Mountaintop will lead to the Mountain Pass. Going East on the Mountain Pass leads on forever, and is a way to go “deeper” into the zone. West leads on forever as well, but it is apparent that all of the road signs have been removed. A signpost may have a note or NPC to notify that the signs have been stolen, and the culprits have a hideout East of the Mountains. After this point, the Mountain Pass can be accessed by going up from the base Mountains, and descending from the Mountaintops leads back to the Mountain Pass.
At this point, players have a full loop – they can go from Forest to Canopy, Mountaintops, Mountain Pass, Mountain Base, and have the Hideout as their next objective. The Forest and Mountain Pass will always have West as a place to go on forever, while the other directions will lead on to different areas. Mountains will always go further Down, Canopy will always go further up, and Mountaintops will always go further East.
The directions where they don’t go on forever can allow for more branching out. What is going on West for the canopy, perhaps the canopy gives way to fetid swamplands or damage from fires or dryness, which themselves lead on to other areas? Maybe the Mountaintops ascend to the Great Peak Temple, that leads out to the cosmos? How about the Mountain Pass, surely it leads on to commerce and traders once the signs have been replaced? This model allows for large amounts of branching out, but without being tied down to physical areas with physical borders so every zone is endless and dynamic.