Hi! Thanks for checking out another Mancers Memo!

Today's Topic:

The paths in the Dungeons and how we've changed the way they generate.

The Dungeons in Mancers are meant to be a bit of maze. They're a supposed to be a hideout for criminals and you can imagine they wouldn't want anybody to just barge in and arrest them. So winding corridors to get lost in, dead ends and places to ambush potential invaders are to be expected in a Dungeon.

But a regular Dungeon in Mancers used to look like this:

Pretty straightforward, right? Each path goes straight to the next chamber, no dead ends and almost no corners. Not very exciting, and not the safest hideout for sure.

Fortunately, we came across this great video by TheZZAZZGlitch, which explains all the inner workings of the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Red/Blue Rescue Team games. You can find that video here, and by all means check it out:

Around 5:30 in the video, dummy rooms are mentioned. These rooms are a great trick to make paths more interesting. Dummy rooms are 1x1 tiles that are scattered around the map when the dungeons are being generated. In the video, it's shown like this:

Normally, when creating paths between the rooms, our Dungeon-generator always tries to create the shortest path between rooms. Because of this, they're always very straight.

But when a dummy room is spawned, the Dungeon-generator will have to try to connect the dummy room into the path it's trying to make. That results in more winding paths. In the video it's shown like this:

We've applied these dummy rooms to the Dungeons in Mancers. Not only do these add the paths like you see above, they can also lead the generator to make some dead-ends. This makes for way more interesting Dungeons, like this one below! This shows the effect when about 30-40 dummy rooms are spawned into a Dungeon.

That's it for the Mancers Memo this week! If you're interested in learning more on the mechanics behind the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon games or Mystery Dungeon games in general, we really recommend checking out that video from TheZZAZZGlitch, they do a great job explaining its inner workings.

If you're still here thank you so much for taking the time to read this. If you want to stay up to date on the progress of Mancers: One More Floor you can go to our page here and follow the game.

Talk to you later!

~Tea Mass Coterie