A little while back, I mentioned that I was in “modular building hell”. I was busy revising the way our modular house system works. This system is intended to give us the ability to create diverse looking houses / house layouts with a minimal amount of unique 3d models required. Our higher-level goal though is to create cool gameplay spaces. Houses in Grim Dawn aren’t just decorative or places you enter to talk to NPCs, they’re a big part of the gameplay area as some regions of the game feature sprawling abandoned towns where you can literally fight room-to-room. ARPG urban combat?
The other upside to this is that it will be available to modders, giving them an incredible amount of flexibility to create cool levels in ways that we probably haven’t even imagined. It is relatively easy to also open up the textures for these pieces and make even more variations.
Here is a peak at just a portion of the pieces for one building texture set and some sample configurations of various houses you can build with different texturing. Note that these are only the wood house walls, we also have other materials such as fieldstone and brick walls. We also have 2nd story pieces and staircases that I totally forgot to include! So many pieces…
The houses themselves aren’t destructible since you can go in them and they help to define the gameplay space. Part of the idea is to essentially create an above-ground layout similar to what you’d normally only see in dungeons, where the player is sometimes fighting in more confined spaces where it is trickier to avoid the enemy. I always liked the sort of room-to-room fighting that happened sometimes in the D2 undergrounds where you had to be careful about running into a room full of enemies where the exit might get cut off and you could be pinned against a wall.
That said, we do plan to sometimes have special breakable wall-pieces that are meant to be a sort of semi-secret way to open up alternate routes through the level. They’d probably be distinguished by some cracking in the wall plaster or whatever that, if you were looking for it, would signal that you could break through.
destructible walls would be cool, and would be handy to hide secret areas or alternative routes, but judging from what you have done so far is amazing, and certainly would add loads to the landscape and differences to the landscape in general, I really like what you have done
the more updates I see about this game, the more Im becoming even more impressed
now that would be a good idea, either next to the house or possible inside, but it would be interesting if there were cellars, more places to hide and ambushes to deal with in search of loot:D
Perhaps there could be an entrance to cave/cellar right next to the house? Anyway, it’s looking pretty good. Not sure if designing this system would save you time, but it definitely looks amazing.
Is it possible for furniture to be placed in front of entranceways to act as a sort of barrier to a secret room? Though I think the illusion could be broken based on how the camera operates top down.
Will the AI have a script to flank the player and possible cut off any retreat when walking into a room?
Yes, I’ve actually done this in a few places. I don’t really do it in such a way as to disguise the door but mainly just to make it appear as though people tried to put up barriers to keep the zombies and such out.
We’ll do secret rooms and such a little differently.
Will the AI have a script to flank the player and possible cut off any retreat when walking into a room?
No, this is one of things that sounds cool but which I think would probably look crappy unless we spent more time that it was worth polishing it. I just imagine enemies running past the player to get between them and a door then awkwardly turning around and running back at them. I think most players would look at something like that and just think "Wtf was that shit? Why do they keep running past me and then turning around?
I think this behavior will happen anyway, by default, in a more natural manner as enemies simply move in and try to find open space around the player to move into and attack.
