Guild Chat - Episode 66
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Guild Chat - Episode 66
- Title
- Deepstone Fractal
- Host
- Rubi Bayer
- Guests
- Jason Reynolds
Benjamin Arnold
Alex Kain
Peter Larkin - Date
- July 6, 2018
- Official video
- YouTube
The following is an unofficial, player-written transcript of the episode. The accuracy of this transcription has not been verified by ArenaNet.
The 66th episode of Guild Chat aired on July 6, 2018. Host Rubi Bayer interviews some of the developers involved in the Deepstone Fractal release.
Transcription[edit]
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Note: The text below hasn't yet been converted from raw subtitle text into pretty print like above.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wyl1slSqa7k |
hi guilders - community and welcome back to guild chat happy Friday I'm your host Ruby and they were talking about the creation of the deep stone fractal the new fractal released with our last episode let me introduce our first round of dev guests guys yes I'm Alex Kane I was the lead writer on this fractal I'm a writer and narrative designer here at ArenaNet and I'm Jason Reynolds and I'm team lead for rates of fractals awesome thank you for leading the charge on this well let's talk first we haven't had we've done guild jets for fractals before but we haven't had someone from the narrative team this had a lot more narrative and a lot more dialogue than usual yes yes it did is it so this was like this was the first sort of big writing project on Guild Wars 2 that I've sort of worked on solo and so I was sort of trying to figure out what what the community was expecting and what the narrative team was expecting how we wanted to kind of push fractal narrative forward a little bit and to see what we could do with the structure that were given and everything just sort of fell into place that way the story was already sort of like the general outline of it was in place and by the time a I came in it was really just you know figuring out who these characters were how often they should talk when they should not talk when they should have many different things that they can say so yeah it was a it was a lot of fun to explore what you know what we can do with fractals yeah I like him in daylight actually did a lot of back and forth as far as just placing the characters and sort of setting up trip wires so that dialogue doesn't really stomp on each other and then there's a branching section so like detecting when players go left or right and like just the way that they dole out the story in the narrative they did pretty good job it sounds like it thank you Alex for thank you folks yeah I mean it was there was a lot of back and forth between the between Eli and myself and really the rest of the team and narrative and just making sure that all those pieces were fitting together the way we wanted him to fit that we were playing it the way real people would actually play it it's trying to trying to anyway yes yes so it was it was an interesting change from the stuff that I normally write so yeah it was really exciting to sort of see it come out and see you know see streamers playing it and you know really really dig in a story Jason what was it like now that you've you've led the team on a number of fractal releases yeah what was it like having something with a deeper narrative staring stop writing it's actually really great because we got to explore a part of Laura that we haven't really addressed at all in Guild Wars 2 uh since you know killers won't obviously and we brought you got to bring back the light at Dell Jamar and just have a little bit more fun making something whereas before with like more the the Crescent fractal Twilight oasis we stole we still call it labyrinth the ditch don't we still call my heart yeah like being able to expand on like a news story was really exciting and being involved in that process but it was great cuz there are some fractals that are really story light and that's good but we don't have a ton that were very story heavy or at least more just more to it yeah yeah and we kind of want to give a little bit more diversity to the fractals and so we'll be doing some some different stuff in the future but but yeah I liked working on the story stuff that's awesome so for those of you who haven't played it yet we've we're well into spoiler territory here so we are going to be talking about spoilers the infamous spoiler alert but I say that because I would like you guys to give just kind of a high-level thing of what the story is sure so I looked at chasing for that Jason please you're the professional so yeah I mean when I came on to the project it was sort of couched as this Indiana Jones but darker sort of story it's about a couple of treasure hunters who delve into this dwarven tomb city and they're looking for something and they've you know in tibi and typical or fashion they find more than they bargained for as you do it's not really an interesting story if they just go in there and they find the thing that they're looking for let's go home I would that fucked over it's like eight feet inside the front door you all right there it is maybe for April Fool's so yeah it was sort of couched that way and there were at there at that point there were already two protagonists there was Kant or him and you are accompanying them and that was one of the first things we had to figure out is like who are these who are the players playing because in fractals you assume a role of you know somebody else so we were saying that you are bodyguards for these two thieves and you were venturing into the lost city of deep stone to find this treasure and that's basically where it was when I came in and a lot of the work that I did early on was in about figuring out what is so I mean that's that's like the overarching story but how like what do these characters do what is their purpose in this story is it just to you know for for gameplay reasons like is you know is K going to lead you to the spiders and Torrens going to lead you to the to the Elektra maze you know what this spoilers spiders and spoilers and we'll talk about the spiders later I got bone to pick there yes yes I had very little to do with the spiders I know they just gave them to me and like what am i what am I supposed to do like not use its no yeah so figuring out what their story was going to be and how their sort of relationship where it was in the beginning and how it evolved over time and where it ends was there was a lot of back and forth there were like nine or ten drafts of the story really yeah there was a lot of back and forth like it started off a sort of very conventional sort of adventure take but as we started running it through the narrative Department we're like you know what like this like we have two characters and we're really doing something that you know we haven't really done in fractals you know too much which is you know the player character doesn't speak but now we have two characters who can sort of bounce off of each other what are their personalities like how do they work together you know what is their past and that really led to a lot of the interesting dialogue that actually wound up in the final in the final draft and that photo that grew it started like an eleven it was massive because it was the first fractal I'd worked on and like most of the things I do I don't do any research before I start so I it was so yeah so like I knew that the fractals stories were lighter and we didn't want to put players in positions where they had to stand around and wait for story to happen that's not what the fractals are all about but still like in my head the amount of time it took to say some of these lines was actually much shorter than it is actually to say these lines so we would get it into the game and most of the Robo voice especially with Robo voice where it's pretty yeah I think that there's like a five-second minimum for any line that you put in there it's a yes it takes five seconds yeah so so it'll be yes and then four and a half seconds of nothing and then the next line so it's a little difficult to time that stuff out but we knew very quickly that I had written way too much stuff which is the thing that I do sometimes right it's like I write maybe too much stuff so I I pulled it back in subsequent drafts and we tightened it up and even when I removed a lot of that extra stuff there was still a lot of stuff to figure out with how the relationship worked where the different story beats are you know in the way the fractal is sort of set up is that it works really well for telling that kind of you know you can tell Kay side of the story when you're on Caze side of the map and you can tell Turin side of the story here on tauron side of the map and that kind of simplified a little bit and it was just a couple of character beats K got a little bit more background than Turin did and then it sort of picks up when you're a little further in and then it resolves at the end like you do like you do with the story almost which is a good thing because if I didn't do that people would be like very confused stopped writing yeah they just stopped characters just stop talking partway through the fight and you know tired so you'd mention Kay and Turin and the different sides of the map since players I mean we know that players are gonna run this more than once and they're going to hear this dialogue more than once and something that you had mentioned me that was that you had to figure out how to make that work without them hearing the same things over and over and over they'll still unfortunately just because I can't write infinite amounts of dialogue and we don't have the budget for infinite infinite amounts of dialogue if I had my druthers like there would be s be alts for literally every single thing that you could do in the whole in the whole fractal but what I ended up doing was there are a couple of bits where the player is spoiler alert there's a maze in our labyrinth and while you're doing that Turin and K are standing on one side and they're just standing there waiting for you to finish this puzzle and I thought that would be a great opportunity to get some story across but when I got the first draft of it in I was like people are gonna get this same story every single time they play this fractal and eventually they're just gonna mute the whole thing and focus on finishing the maze so that was where I dropped in I think there are three variants for every single line that they can say during that conversation and each one of those variants is basically gets the same point across but it's worded differently or the tone is slightly different and each one of those can segue into the next lines of that conversation so they can suck it into any one of those and it makes sense so that was that's just one example there are a lot of alts for things like you know character comments on something when like a spider drops down there may be a couple of different variants for that a lot of a lot of different combat barks things like that it's I mean you always want alts for those but there was a lot there's a lot more of that no I mean when you have a smaller space that you're playing over and over again you don't want players to get bored of the story you want to give as much as possible and we we try we tried yeah we did well it's like you managed to get a lot of branching options in there for the constraints that you were working within it's got to be really really different writing for a fractal just for a specific rectal environment instead of open-world her story it's it's like a short so I mean it's kind of like I imagine how the open-world quests kind of work in in living world is that they are like short stories where you have a very limited amount of space to tell a story and obviously the way players are engaging with the content is a little different they're running through it they're gonna try to go through it as quickly as possible so figuring out how to marry that style of gameplay with story is a challenge and yeah fortunately the rest of the team was helping me sort of get acquainted with that storytelling style and ultimately we were able to make a thing we made a thing we did we did it yes but you were explaining to me like an analogy that you have for writing for living world compared to rates compared to fractals yes oh yes yes I tell me it would be hilarious if I just like forgot what it was and this is huge no it's not it's not nearly that interesting I was saying that fractals are like short stories the raids are like novellas and living world it's like a full novel or like a series of novels just in terms of how much time you have to get a story across introduce characters set up plot situations and things like that you know it's it's it's you you kind of have to approach each one from a different mindset and what makes game writing in particular challenging for these but it's like a good challenge is that you also have to consider how the players are engaging with that content again having a player stand around in a fractal for many many minutes listening to dialogue is not good it's not great so yeah so speaking of introducing characters we had the strange voice and there was like a whole language thing happening there yes it was a lot of fun the story took a couple of different twists and turns in the early drafts and the voice used to speak English or you know common in in the game and we decided that that wasn't spooky enough it really wasn't and we wanted to sort of explore the idea that if this thing has been living you know in in the earth for so many years maybe it wouldn't speak our language and then it was a question of what language does it speak and then loke is kind of like peering from behind like a blank language we're good at that and you know I can't just say like oh you know they'll bill some of these words they'll be in some other language because then you localize it to that language and it doesn't work so it was an interesting conundrum but fortunately as is usually the case deep diving into the Guild Wars lore helped a lot there is some stuff in Guild Wars 1 that helped in the creation of a word cipher that it's it's it's a word cipher it's it's it's a letter swap cipher that I would that I plugged into this website that lets me you know just like say this letter of the alphabet equals this letter in the cipher this letter of the alphabet equals this and then I could just type out full lines of dialogue and it would spouts gibberish back at me and it was completely unprincipled to any human voice so I had to like I had to change it so instead of saying something like what are you doing here it would I would have to lie arrange things around so it'd be like you know doing what is here question mark you know and then that would yield some some words that sounded like words and then steve blum and john dimaggio who voiced some of these some of these lines actually was just steve blum who had to had to do the the spoopy lines in the weird language really just knocked it out of the park it was absolutely phenomenal he did and funny thing about that that was part of the recording session in Burbank that I was attending and I was bouncing back and forth between two studios that we were recording in and I happened to walk in with no context while Steve Blum was recorded that and I slip into the studio as he's midway through this you know what Steve Blum sounds like he does he can I'm just saying they're going it was Eve Eve er tom was like having a stroke he always sounds like that gravel and shoves a bottle brush down his throat and then he delivers my lines he is absolutely phenomenal I was there I wasn't there physically but I was on skype for a lot of the for a lot of the recording and so I could sort of hear him deliver the lines and and then for the for the bits where he's talking over John DiMaggio who plays Turin there was this sort of you know the the director at the booth would play Steve blooms lines back because they would be layered over one another and so the timing had had to sync up and I remember John you know just like aghast at what he was here like what is like what are you asking me to do and you know at the moment that the script for those scenes went into our system and editing and look had a chance to look at it I had some very interesting conversations with them I was given stated they just appear at your desk like yes they didn't do this they came to me I didn't have to go anywhere they descended on me yeah like so alex is it possible that you've lost your mind yes so yeah loke came to talk to me about it and we had to come up with a game plan for how we're going to localize a language that doesn't exist is it going to be steai I think though I think ultimately what they ended up doing and don't hold me to this is that it's Steve Bloom's voice in all the languages but then the local Turin actor does their lines in there in their language and they sort of sync up together okay that makes sense I think I think that's what they ended up doing I'm not sure if that's true but I'm only talking in front of all these people there's we've talked a lot about narrative and it's exciting to see something to go in a different direction and get to try something new Jason something that you worked on in there there were I mean you worked on a lot of the things but like the hidden treasure chests are one of the oh those are actually one of my favorite things that that were implemented but my part as far as my working on the fractal it's much more leadership sort of thing like more like approvals and like working with them on it was a little bit more behind the scenes yeah Alliant Ben did all of the implementation Jason was very motivational though that's my job particularly for fractals is more to vet things or when we're doing like a boss encounter you sort of lead the the process that we go through to get encounters built and design and then also to make sure that we are going to our play tests and play testing everything and just that everything's running and operational so between that and and kyer producer it's a lot of back-and-forth yeah juggling yes it's uh you know it's one of the in terms of like the size of the content the fractals are pretty small compared to something like a living world episode but there are a lot of pin there there there are a very very few people working very hard full-time on on that stuff oh yeah yeah yep okay so like the light of jail tomorrow if anyone's not not aware I enjoy them because it's something we haven't really done in fractals before and in in raids we have our little mini chests so you can kind of run around and explore and find this guy of looting it and so I enjoyed the fact that that was built into the fractal on top of the delight of d'el djem our SAS skill or special action skill because Rosasco because I just I just love that stuff like running around like new sparkles and so I just ate that up I thought a super cool fun were you involved in the you do for you know for other content that you work on you have like the the brainstorming meetings early on to come up with like the themes that you want to explore yeah that's that's kind of where my job is it's like I do a lot of implementation for the for the raids not for fractals but for my yeah my job is to get all the brain storms going the product direction make sure all the Ducks are in a row or at least like kicking them that way but yeah and then and then Kyle our producer will help me get timeline set up and schedules and make sure all the meetings are running and then I can go in there and when the team works together to brainstorm stories before we hand off fully sanera t'v and then we brainstorm the encounters and a lot of the events and so on and so forth and then everything just it goes through paper design - pitching it - leads - which is actually a really fun process I think the pitch like a lot of people are very nervous about it really yeah kind of like in a room like a PowerPoint presenting too like to Jason V and some she's very intimidating yeah I mean I've been like a fly on the wall at a couple of those and I think I've said maybe like five collective words in all the ones I've been in but it's you know there's a lot of pressure at least really sell it you know yeah and you also want people to like your thing right yeah yeah we so we get through pitch and then once we're pitch approved we start building the prototypes and then from there I think we have about a month and a half roughly where we expect you know start to finish it's playable but its prototype so everything's gray box which I think been brought in some really cool pictures that you'll get to see so like this is what the fractals look like in prototype game looks like in prototype really yeah it's it's yes that is great boxes a good name for it yeah no I mean that there's a reason why we call it that there's some red there's some red boxes over those are special in the secret nobody knows what they're so yeah so there's a lot of a month and a half of getting everything after prototype and then approvals with getting more leads involved and sign-off and my job is to make sure that everything's moving and growing the way that it should be yeah all right well I have one more question for you guys and then we'll move on to our next set of fractal doubts what's something it little and maybe off to the side and this fractal that you really love and you hope players find or you're happy that they already found and you only had can have one for me it would be the source material of the cipher that the voice uses it is it has been used in Guild Wars before though not in the way that I'm using it okay I'll say that I'll let I'll let the community do the work spiders are so great a lot of really cool stuff in this fractal like they have a spider skitter Ben's entire interview is gonna be about the spike we're gonna be it's gonna be good he's got like 14 hours of spider footage the source material is spiders that's a spoiler yeah don't all right thank you guys very much I you all hang in here with us for just a second and we'll be right back [Music] [Music] [Music] and welcome back we have a new round of deaf guests why don't you guys introduce yourselves and talk about what you worked on for this rectal I'm Peter Larkin and I was the QA in bed and I am Ben Arnold I am the content programmer for fractals and rates awesome all right so what does the QA embed do besides slamming into the same wall a million times well it's I test everything obviously but it's also a lot of I participate in the brainstorming feedback and and I go to all the meetings so I'm kind of like I'm there during the whole process so I can give like early feedback if there's concerns from a QA perspective when something's being implement you know brainstormed like early on you don't like build something and I'm like oh god guys yeah you know playing it like five times more than any of the devs so the feedback is always really good about you been so I usually will do more the techie stuff like build some more complicated skills do anything involving math or anything that requires code I will design things like the the whole spider area I would I designed that but usually Elijah handles more of the overarching design of the story he came up with the original pitch and the design Docs for all that and built the final boss and then most of the other stuff that's not like a procedurally generated puzzle or crazy skill we don't have Elijah so you are both Ben and Elijah okay so I know we talked with Alex a little bit about narrative how did we come up with okay let's let's go to the store Evan fractal and here's what we want to tell and here's where we want to go we really wanted a change of scenery with this one we wanted to go somewhere we hadn't gone before we wanted to have sort of a theme that we hadn't had before we didn't really maybe swampland a little bit but we didn't have much of like a horror kind of dark theme and we were looking around at different types of senior that worked really well for this assets that we had already so we didn't have to build a whole new prop set and the Dwarven ruins ended up being a really good choice for this so we were kind of thinking about it we were sketching out little ideas we kind of were thinking to have sort of a mines of moria feel to it and up not being quite so grand as that but we went along with that and then we decided you know this is really good for horror we have all these different creatures like spiders that we be really good for this imps all those kind of things and then we just I don't I didn't come up with each story that was more Elijah and Alex but that's kind of how it started okay let's talk about the spiders spiders so the spiders I think a lot of people won't notice this because the spiders are really weak their little baby spiders and little poison spiders and the big spiders don't have this but we actually did build a new AI for them and there are powerpoints if we have time to go through them but it's it's a divergence from how we normally do AI in an MMO normally yeah here never said before let's look at the spider power so this is actually a PowerPoint that I did for the design team any time I do anything remotely techy I like to make a little PowerPoint and present it to the team so that they can use it in whatever they want to do I've actually had a few people come and talk to me about this so you may see this so this yeah do the gifs actually work as a gif it doesn't appear to be working that's too good but imagine this spiders really scary and it like moves around in a scary way like a real spider this isn't what spiders normally look like so you can go ahead so on the right we have the player on the Left we have the spider like normally if you go to the next slide this is what happens in an MMO just walk straight up to you and then it starts like Auto attacking you or whatever it doesn't feel like a spider it feels like an MMO mob face sorry no that's fine so if you if you go on I think there's another gift that this is showing normal spiders just imagine them attacking you from like 400 units away doing what mobs normally do and this isn't what I wanted I wanted to play around with something new because I always like to do weird new things so this is what I really wanted I want them to kind of dart in and out go back and forth kind of skitter around and when you're playing if rectly you probably won't notice this because you'll be just a Oh eing everything and they'll be dying really fast but if you stop and pay attention you'll see they kind of dart in and out and for this behavior I had to do some very simple things I didn't want to make a really complicated AI for this so like they if you if you go forward well so here's like some example movement patterns they would come kind of darting back and forth to you when when they get in they would dart in and out as they attack instead of just staying in range of your attacks they'll do an attack and then they'll try to get out of range of you and player attacks are huge so it ends up not really matter but if you go on there's a little bit of technical stuff best yeah trying to giving this a high-level explanation but imagine the spider is s and the player is T for some reason go ahead and go forward all you do is you get the offset by subtracting them as a simple vector map click you get the distance with a random distance this tells you how far away the spider is click and then we want to do sort of a random angle weave we rotate that off that offset vector that is scaled to the distance by that random angle and then we can move the spider in that sort of a zig-zag pattern we just keep doing that every now and then and then when it gets close you do sort of a two-part attack where he moves in does the attack and moves out and we have these sort of areas of influence here that determine how the AI works these are colored here but if you go to the next slide you'll see that there's sort of different wait times assigned each one so based on the distance to the nearest player it will pick one of these wait times to decide how fast it's going to be thinking that way you can imagine if you're really far away the spider is gonna kind of sit there and wait and just kind of hide in its corner and then when you get closer it sort of skitters forward a little bit and when you get really close it's gonna skitter around all over the place and go crazy click there is one more issue this is which is walls which is really interesting like we could do some really complicated pathfinding logic to figure out how to get around walls but that really complicates the thing and makes it more expensive than it needs to be and this simple vector check is really simple so what we would do is click we just go ahead and generate it like we're just moving in random directions and then if it goes inside a wall we say oh don't do that one try again and we'll try again about five times and usually it ends up generating a vector that allows you to go around the wall nice and easy and then there's another gift that doesn't work but yeah that's that's the spider talk so where did you get these ideas to make the spiders more spider like well I just whenever I make something in the game I don't like to just kind of copy what we've been doing before I always like to try to approach things from a different angle and see if they're something we can do that's new and interesting and you know it within reason because a lot of times you'll spend a lot of work on something it doesn't really matter this ended up not being that much work but for this I just wanted spiders that were spiders and I just have the idea that we can do that I looked at some gifts and then just you know screwed around the net we ended up working out all right maybe you talked to somebody that has a yeah I've had a couple tranches over the years and so I'm never coming to your house yeah I don't have any right now but when I heard you working on it and I was like kind of like sidled over and was like so I hear you're working on Spyder yeah yeah and so I was I gave pointers on like how they kind of tend to move in short bursts they they stop and feel the ground to like tell where their prey is and then they look kind of lurch oh yeah in the direction and because almost all spiders use vibrations to tell where their prey is and suddenly they have like sudden movements they'll be completely still for hours and then just lightning fast they shoot off in a direction so yeah there's actually parts when the spiders will move where they'll kind of like dart off to an area where the player can't even reach it because there's valid navmesh there and that's all the spider cares about but it's like darting between a crack in the wall almost and then coming back out and ends up feeling really natural and it just that was just sort of an emergent behavior that happened to due to the simple behavior that was created positive there's this room is full of spite so did you participate after after Ben was working on this did you participate in kind of giving feedback on yes this feels right yeah I gave a little bit of feedback on it I mean I understood that that we weren't making a spider simulation so I was like no you need to like change this stuff about the spiders but yeah I just I like that they had the short quick movements and it made them feel different you know and they weren't just another like MMO creature that just kind of like runs directly towards attacking you so and do we have plans to retro actively change every spider in the game to terrify me no way the way I built this I was you know lazy programmer typical me I I did it so that it would work really well in our instance it actually just says where are all the players in the instance and then it figures out which is the closest and all that some that's not something you can't do when there's like 60 players in the open-world so if we were to just copy paste this into the open-world it wouldn't work without tweaks so and it would probably break everything so no you're not going to see that but you might see it in some instance content going forward do you want to take a moment to point and laugh at you the concept of you being lazy because you work ridiculously hard efficiency I was like yeah okay yeah imitations exactly like if I can do an extra you know twenty percent of work upfront to save 80 percent of work later I like to do stuff like that I think you can make us more things exactly what are some other things that you guys worked on that you particularly are happy with in this dungeon well the puzzles are pretty cool and I'm cueing them was probably a night yeah it was the maze was was a lot yeah it I actually what I ended up doing with the maze was I I did my normal testing around it but also literally every time I went into the instance everything like there was we can skip stuff but I was like I really shouldn't skip this because I just need to look at this maze as many times as I possibly can and so every single time I went to the instance even if I was in there to look at something else I just did the maze like it was I did hundreds and hundreds of times and that's like a good lesson learned because the reason for that is that this is a procedural maze and normally we don't do procedural things not in Guild Wars and probably not in many n mmo's so that's something I wanted to explore with this both both of them a puzzles I should say that little Tetris simple one that it's super easy and then the maze have sort of a procedural aspect to it they're not going to be the same each time you go through because of that you got to test it a lot and you're still not gonna see everything suddenly it's gonna go alive and there's gonna be an educator you didn't think of yeah and then the really tricky thing is when I did find a bug there there's not a repro so I can't be like do one two three and then the bug happens yeah I have to be like maybe this will happen when you do the maze because there really isn't anything you can do yeah yeah so I just gotten out of taking a lot of screenshots or I'd call Ben over whenever something happened so he could see it yeah he didn't see it how like happen but he could see the immediate aftermath in the game and then he you know he it helped him figure out what was going on which and that's another great lesson like even if it is fully procedural there are ways we can make that make that easier like you could have had the ability to kind of get whatever seed was being used and then give that to me so that I could procedurally generate the exact same maze from it and then see the reproof of the bug really yeah that would've been what I should have done it's nice I think we have didn't give us a gif of the yeah we have some so this is actually this is an earlier iteration and I actually have another PowerPoint I don't I don't know if we have time but for this one you can see it's sort of journey here we go labyrinth great let's do it yeah click so this is another one I gave to the the the design team starting with just the Tetris puzzle this one's really easy we call it the Tetris puzzle internally because it's essentially the way it mechanically works is the same as Tetris you have these grids of cells and then the shapes kind of move down except in this they fall at the bottom and then they're not like 3d shapes that can rotate it's just one line and we sort of kind of generate a path through it we just look at like what was the previous valid path position and then kind of generate a sort of random offset for the next one there's a little bit of splitting logic but it's super simple people just blink through this or use their shadow steps or whatever click but the Pedro made one this one was more interesting this one was a bit harder to figure out I knew I wanted something procedural for the maze because you're gonna be using a lot of d'el djem were to kind of raise tiles and and walk through it while creatures are attacking you and I didn't want you to just memorize the fastest way through it and just go that way every time I wanted you to have to react to dead ends and and things like that but we also wanted to make sure that the worst case scenario isn't super bad where you have this sneaking path it takes 30 minutes to get through or you have just a straight-line path to the end because when it's procedurally generated we can't really know exactly what players are going to get generated click here's a gift that doesn't work I pulled this from Wikipedia if you google depth-first search on Wikipedia you'll see something like this from a is if you if you're a computer science student and you're learning algorithms in class you've probably made this exact generator but this is the naive generation algorithm was just depth-first search and I started with that but it wasn't quite what I wanted if you click to the next slide you'll see it's probably hard to see what the contrast here but just the way this works with the generic depth-first search on this kind of a grid you get a lot of very long straight line paths and you also have sort of this grid alignment that doesn't allow you to have more kind of diagonal paths it's it's very I don't know but it's left right left right left right yeah it's it's not it's not the greatest shape for what I wanted so I had to make some tweaks to that algorithm it's still used up for search to do it but there is sort of I think I called it neighbor ownership depth-first search or corner ownership I don't know it just instead of considering just adjacent tiles you consider neighbors and you do a little more complex logic click but yeah neighbor ownership DFS shorter turns windy pass it was just a more pleasing algorithm in my mind click so the problem is even with my new algorithm we still had this issue it's random so we don't know exactly what's gonna happen best case for players at least I say best case because it's the fastest way through you just get this straight line from start to end and then worst case it takes forever and that's just a huge disparity that I didn't want but we can minimize the disparity click by splitting this into actual 3 sub mazes that are sort of rectangles so we still look at the best case in the worst case but you can see they're a lot more in line with each other in the best case since we're kind of going through these three mazes with three and ending start points in different positions you get a more snaking pattern just naturally and you'll actually notice this as you're going through you'll see the check points these are the checkpoints at the starts of each maze that you go through and it ended up working a lot better the generation was a lot more consistent and yeah just it ended up feeling better in general yeah that's may stuff it's it's interesting to see how you because with procedural generated anything that's my thought what if it gives you something that's very easy and that's the beauty of it yeah like you have to be aware of the things that can happen you can't be aware of everything but you can try to at least in this case I could have been a bit more aware of probably edge cases and things there was one issue that we had to patch really quick because I didn't think of an edge case but now it should all be good yeah and if I had made a more intelligent algorithm to generate it that edge case would have been impossible but I did the lazy programmer thing and did something of sort of hacky workaround that made that edge case possible yeah okay I want to talk about maybe not necessarily education but things that you managed to break because of them we're amazing yeah the the tetris puzzle hallway so what happens is if you hit if you if your health hit zero it teleports you back to the beginning because you failed failed I but we don't want to kill you the problem is that the game thinks you went down so it was spawning fractal Avengers fractal of indicators elementalists were dropping lava fonts and and so I think I don't know if we got the screenshot but I had a screenshot of like multiple fractal Avengers Avengers like on the tile with a lava font it just blowing big masses chaos oh yeah and that was just for me like if you can imagine five players that were failing the things that I don't anticipate like I'm not testing with every instability on anytime I make these fractals so it's it's good to have Peter going through the other fun one was the the tornados of the element responds I like my main on live is elementalist and so I was like I wonder what happens if an elementalist turns into a tornado and then gets caught by the tornado and it turned out that like it overrode the transform that the boss tornado put on you and gave you your skills in the tornado your your elementals tornado skills and so then you could use those to like escape the tornado and it was just sure yeah it turns out like a lot of transforms could get you out the tornado but that's how I found it really yeah so that's what we got it fixed yeah sorry that's one next plate wind tick yeah I had you guys it was like you were stuck in there forever right yeah yeah is Wintec just requires a lot of testing there's a lot of cases where if if if we're not careful of the player could have the wind permanently applied to them until they change maps and essentially depending on the type of wind texture it's like moving you to a point or just a static vector you can like fly around you'll get stuck just kind of hovering somewhere it's it's it's it's hilarious but it's bad yeah we call it wind tech because it's primarily used for wind it really is just arbitrary forces and its really low-level so it's really easy to accidentally apply force and not remove it and then just break everything which happened it turns out in a funny way I flew all over the I think you prevented the rest well I'll ask you guys the same question I asked the other two what is one of your favorite things that you worked on or put in there that you're looking forward to players coming across or they already have yeah well they already have I guess but just the stuff I've already talked about this the maze and the spider it was really fun to build and I was hoping players would enjoy it so far players seem to like it I haven't heard a whole lot about the spiders I think just because they killed them all so fast but the maze seems to be pretty fun yeah I guess for me it's more my job to not put things in the in the map for people to see broken I check out yeah I mean I did I give the feedback on the spider movement I mean that was mostly bad but I was just I gave some feedback based on my experience yeah awesome well thank you guys very very much for coming on here of course I appreciate the time and we will see you guys on the next Guild Chat.
