On-foot

Developers
Designer(s): Nicolas Masson

What is this feature?
These are the on-foot levels that the players will be traversing once they have boarded an enemy ship. Those will be comprised of room templates which are then used in the procedural generation of the level layout.

Why do we have this feature?
Room templates allows us to benefit from the advantages of both procedural and handcrafted content. The templates allow us to tailor the player experience and the art on a room per room basis while still allowing to have the level layout be procedurally generated for the sake of game repetition. 

Design Goals | How should it be designed?
Overall, the on-foot level design is primarily there to support and enable the on-foot aspect of the combat design as well as the player’s squad. It imparts its design goals from them which would be:
 * 1) Fast paced gameplay - Our levels need to be built to accommodate fast gameplay, meaning we need to be careful about having too many cramped spaces and hindering the player’s mobility.
 * 2) Boarding aspect - Players board enemy vessels/stations in order to attack from the inside, the layout of levels need to reflect that through the location of the boarding and the flow
 * 3) Combat oriented - The level design is at the service of the combat, which is the main focus of the on-foot aspect of gameplay. Levels need to accommodate the various enemies that will be featured in the game.
 * 4) De-emphasized exploration - The focus of the game being combat, exploration should not be a major aspect of the gameplay. As such we avoid making players backtrack within a level.
 * 5) Short - Levels should have a relatively quick playthrough. The traversal time can vary from a ship to ship basis. The reason for that is that within one act of the game players will board more than one ship on top of fighting spaceship battles.

How is it implemented?
In order to create the templates, we use a tool made with Houdini provided by an outsourcing group. The tool allows level designers to specify walk-able tiles, non walk-able tiles, delete tiles (replacing them with walls), set the amount of doors, and the type of room.

Once this is done, the tool will then automatically generate the room as well as place assets, depending on the type of room and the non walk-able spaces selected by level designers. They can then roll the seed randomly until they find a layout that suits them.

The template is then passed on to a combat designer who will select a combat scenario for it, and then to an artist to create an art pass, only to come back to the level designer for a final review of the template. It is then added to the database and placed in the right folder, allowing it to be picked by the PCG tool.

Rules:
 * 1) Corridors must be 3 tiles wide to accommodate combat
 * 2) Doors need 5 tiles in order to spawn properly