Devlog: Week 18

This week I started realising an idea I had for how elements should be distributed in the world.

My original idea was that various parts of the Coil should have different elements, and these would affect the visual appearance, item properties, mobs, and custom events therein (depending on the strength of the elements).

Each floor now has a single biome type and an element strength of 0-100%. Above 80 and the features will be significantly prominent.

The current types are:

• Fire

• Poison

• Plague

• Ice

• Magic

• Lightning

• Holy

• Dark

For example a floor with fire biome of strength 100 will have the highest chance of producing items with fire damage and resistance, as well as mobs featuring these properties.

Depending on which items and spells you currently have, some biomes will be more accessible than others, for example if you have a weapon with ice damage and lots of fire resistance gear in a fire biome.

A resistance value above 100 will let you absorb damage as health, so it can be a real game-changer.

For every item and mob spawned on a floor, a biome strength roll is made to determine if element adjustments should be applied.

Biome element variations will bring another layer of tactical thinking on top of navigating the risks and opportunities already available. A common scenario could be that you try to travel between biomes you are better prepared for while stacking up more general purpose gear.

For pivoting purposes I thought it could be fun to add a rare item that turns all your equipped resistances into a single random type. High risk/reward with a probable radical change of tactics.

For current testing purposes, each floor has a completely random biome type and strength set, but I plan to do a more dynamic distribution where strengths and types ease out over time, maybe by using a sine function with various phase length where biome strengths are set from its amplitude. Maybe also restrict some biomes to certain floor intervals etc.

My original idea included having the Coil as a voxel grid (64x64x100) and settings points in the cloud where biomes would emanate from and decrease in strength the longer from their origin you sampled, basically creating spheres, and letting them mix with each other. I did not want to handle all the complexity that would come from mixing multiple biomes on the same floor so I skipped it, but now that I think of it perhaps it won't be that hard.. I will give it some more thought.

Anyway, there will also be a lot more work to define each biomes characteristics to make them more uniquely distinguishable both in terms of visual aspects but also how they play.

As the Coil is planned to be 100 floors deep, there will need to be enough variation to keep things fresh. I'm also hoping that enough custom events will help spice things up in this regard as well, and many of them will be context (biome) dependent.

Changelog:

• Add support for elemental biome tilemaps with palette swaps.

• Add single-tile animated decorations (bubbling water / lava / poison etc)

• For floors that have fluid as roof, set walls as fluid as well.

• Base spawned item properties on biome element strength.

• Make basic slime mob types for all elements.

• Base spawned mobs on biome element strength.

• Add support for natural trait elemental damage type.

• Show added resistances in item info and status screen.

• Change all tilesets to use columns instead of edges mapping.