Room prefab in action. Only floor/wall distinction is made so we can’t place prefab features yet (like bookshelves) so these get autogenerated

A couple things this week. The prefab work is still going slowly, due to some days off, some IRL deadlines (it’s deadline season!) and finding a new thing to “distract” myself, which is the website/blog.

I plan to change the name of the game, as the current name reflects some outdated game design goals that I’m no longer after, ergo “irrelevant”. A new story-framework has been crafted (read here if you fancy) and a new name needs to be developed to reflect that change in direction. So, the complication is that I’ve bought a domain name which expires this July, and instead of renewing to something else that is similarly prone to whatever the future has in store, I thought I’d use Github Pages instead, which allows such changes more effortlessly. Github Pages and WordPress do not seem to mix well, so after a bit of research I decided to go with Jekyll, which is a popular static site generator. This has the added bonus that everything looks more like code, rather than the very GUI-driven interface of WordPress which I’m not a fan of. Since I don’t know much about web development, this transition takes a bit of time, and importing the blog into Jekyll is non-trivial as I have to fix embeds, links, images etc, and I’ve got a couple of months to do that before the other domain dies.

Regarding prefabs, I did get room prefabs to work (see figure above), where you can see the room placed everywhere in the dungeon, and sparse features like bookshelves or encounters are placed appropriately in there. But there are some more things to be done, because it’s never that easy. Room prefabs should also be able to include content besides just the shape. For example you could make a library room and place the bookshelves yourself, rather than rely on the placement algorithm. So, to support both procedural placement and fixed placement, is slightly tricky.