![]() At the time, we began to develop our own “AI Director”, adapted for Dead Cells. Have a look over here for the basic explanation of the concept, it’s really quite interesting.ĭead Cells was at first thought as a Tower Defense. In LFD, Valve designed the levels to be dynamically modified through its “AI Director” system. Unexpected right? Well, it’s something of a trace left over from “that time Dead Cells was a zombie tower defense game” but we definitely took some lessons from their underlying ideas. The first one is Faster Than Light, which we regard as a model when it comes to a game allying procedural generation with a well orchestrated plot and a very consistent universe. Before we get into the technical details of how this hybrid approach is implemented in our game, I want to mention two other sources of inspiration for Dead Cells. But to sum it up, they used a hybrid approach between procedural generation and hand made levels, giving them that consistent feeling while maintaining a lot of diversity. You can find a brief explanation of how that works here, if you’re interested. Here, we’d like to thank the guys behind Spelunky, who came up with some interesting solutions to the same problem. Not satisfied with either full handcrafting or full procedural generation, we could feel that there was a way to find a middle ground that would work. In short it was illogical, chaotic and left you with no feeling of consistency or immersion in the world. While the core gameplay feeling was improved by the freshness of new enemy placement, the level design took a great big hit. Even better, we found that it fundamentally altered the feeling of the combat of the game, placing the emphasis on the player’s instincts and reflexes rather than relying on rote learning a level in order to progress. And it worked well, bringing more replay value, a significant improvement for a game with any type of permadeath mechanic. In light of this, it seemed like an obvious choice to at least build a prototype to test out the idea for Dead Cells. On top of this, great use of procedural generation was being shown off by a bunch of critically and commercially successful games: Isaac, Minecraft, Starbound, etc. Before Dead Cells, we had already done quite a lot of browser games, most of them involving randomized elements and procedural generation so we were already quite familiar with the core concepts of procedural generation. From there, we knew we had to find alternatives. ![]() Unfortunately, we quickly realized that we wouldn’t have the time to do it properly, considering the modest size of our team. ![]() At first, about two years ago when we began to design and build a prototype for Dead Cells, we went for the traditional, handmade way of doing things. Before looking at the how of the matter, let’s discuss the why, the reasons we chose to involve procedural generation in a genre known for painstaking level design. If you're more a video kind of guy, we released on a "lighter" version (still rather technical) of this dev diary on Youtube. So we’d like to acknowledge these concerns and take a deep dive into how we're planning to bring rogue-lite re-playability to a metroidvania. This is particularly obvious when talking about a genre that relies on meticulous level design at its core. After recent high profile procedural generation controversies, we can't blame people for being skeptical. So yeah, as you would expect, questions about the quality of our procedural generation pop up very regularly, with both players and other devs. So, to introduce myself quickly, I'm Sebastien and I'm the Lead dev/game designer/level designer/whatever I need to be at the moment on Dead Cells. Well! It took some time, but we wanted to make things right. Well three months ago (already? whoah) I said we will talk about how we're using Procedural Generation in Dead Cells.
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