Dev Diary 57 - Procedural Everything

The most important and impactful (and sort of spontaneous!) change that I just made and that appears to fit quite well was procedural passives. I’ll explain what shortly what does that mean. But it’s funny that they extend the extensive list of procedurally-generated things Colossal Citadels already has, and I didn’t quite plan that!

What is “procedural”? It means that each instance of this type of game entity will be unique every time you play, and it’s unlikely that you’ll find the same two items (unless the item is “common” and not some epic rarity). In addition to that, it’s common that games with procgen include some very rare hand-made content to make it not as monotonous - I’m going to do this as well, but I’m trying to make procedural content as various and interesting as possible by including a lot of crazy parts in the generators.

There are quite a lot of procedural stuff already in the game:

• procedural world, of course
• procedural equipment and loot
• procedural resource types
  • procedural ore visuals and descriptions
  • procedural tree visuals and descriptions (wip)
• procedural creature stories
• magic schools
• procedural architecture styles for fortifications (planned)
• procedural species (wip)
• procedural villages and cities (and their cultures)
• probably procedural something else that I forgot already

There was thoughts and researches of procedural active abilities, but I don’t think I’m going to go for it for various reasons (I want cool meaningful combos, exciting icons, names and styles), but there might be something related to that in the far.

Abilities in Colossal Citadels

Before that change, creatures could have multiple abilities. But play sessions shown that getting a second ability, third, and so on is not that exciting due to very simple mechanics of acquiring abilities: you had a choice of 6 abilities per creature, and could acquire them using elemental gems. It was possible to get all 6 abilities, and if you’re lucky, you could theoretically get even more abilities in the world.

The case of 3+ abilities wasn’t so common, but other abilities felt quite pointless because it’s not allowed to cast more than one at the same time (you can queue them up, though). Plus, upon acquiring ability, choice pool didn’t change and you had to select from fewer less exciting options every time.

What I needed to do to solve this is making getting a second ability super hard - you can’t get it the simple way with elemental gems anymore! Now when you acquire the first active ability (by choosing from 6 creature-specific abilities), other 5 choices get replaced with passives!

Procedural Passive Abilities

I’ve been playing some very hardcore tactics game and really liked how passives did some things on some conditions. I wanted to transfer some of that feeling to my game.

Procedurally-generated passive mechanics are composed of two parts:

condition + effect

Examples:

Active abilities have triangle icon with a corner facing down, and passive abilities have a corner facing up.

What I liked is that you now can synergize these abilities with something else (other abilities, other passives, or chosen play style), and there is quite some combo potential! I’m continuing tests with my best friend and I hope soon I’ll make some public playtest. Though, now I got exposed to in-person communication with a lot of nice AAA-gamedev people in Sweden and might want to do offline tests.

Some, though, are still overpowered, which is fixable:

And some of which are stylistically ridiculous (which is hard to fix, but I’ll try), for example:

Changelog

Also I’ve been fixing bugs, many of them related to new movement system, which feels quite well so far. And playing turn-based strategies and city-builders, haha. I’m also feeling better than in the beginning of the year. Here is the full changelog (not so huge this time):

• Procedural passives
  • 6 conditions (and a lot of condition ideas in the backlog)
  • 13 new effects in addition to 58 existing ones
  • Icon generator
  • Name generator
• Redesigned acquiring ability mechanics
• Working on new tech tree
• Balance changes
  • Less equipment loot
  • More powerful creeps (since it got easier after changes to the movement system)
• New sounds for some spells and UI actions
• Fixed bugs
  • Effect visuals don’t get duplicated on re-equip
  • When you can learn a new magic school, it won’t show the spells you already have in your faction knowledge

Thanks for reading! Here is my tiny little dog, I love her so much: