Hello all! Lucas here, once again, to talk more about ASU! Today we will be talking about dungeons and various mechanisms therein. Each run toward takes the player through three different dungeons to their ultimate goal of Castle Glass, the game's ending dungeon. Dungeon is used loosely here, as a lot of them are more like areas than dungeons, but I digress. Initially, your runs will be the same each time: Malignant Marsh -> Putrid Plains -> Virulent Village -> Castle Glass. But after defeating Castle Glass's master, and your character's long lost relative, you will unlock a higher difficulty and with each new difficulty comes a set of three new areas, one for each 'slot', that you can possibly enter into each run. So, for instance, the hard difficulty unlocks are: Star-crossed Spores, Blistering Beach, and Scorching Skeletons. (I like the alliteration, sue me!) Which means that any given run can look like: Malignant Marsh -> Blistering Beach -> Virulent Village -> Castle Glass. Or: Star-crossed Spores -> Putrid Plains -> Virulent Village -> Castle Glass. There will be an unlocked level for each 'slot' for each difficulty, so in total there will be 12 different levels that will be unlocked once you reach the final difficulty. Ultimately, you will always end up back at Castle Glass. And Castle Glass will also change with each difficulty, becoming more unstable and blighted by the fetid magic that seeps from Saren Glass, changing the area to be much more dangerous overall. An aside: there is a way to reset the game's difficulty, two in fact, but I will focus on the one that is unlocked from the start. The difficulty resetter, Fa'lia, will allow you to turn the difficulty back to normal, but doing so [b]will not[/b] reset the dungeons that are available. Castle Glass's form, however, will revert as it is tied strictly to difficulty level. [b]Fa'lia, the resident resetter[/b] [img]https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images//44963883/1de754a4e2c1213874c5ee7be1976659ffd05a49.png[/img] Each dungeon is randomly generate from a set of hand-made tiles. The make-up is entirely randomized, other than the fact that you can make it from the start to the end. Below are 4 examples of the Malignant Marsh - each in a different difficulty. The current difficulty that you are playing on increases a lot of things: enemy strength, enemy number, trap spawns, mana shard drops, etc. But! It also increases the maximum length of dungeons, ensuring that runs through the higher difficulties will end up taking longer and longer, pushing you to your limit! [img]https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images//44963883/85510b755c60a6135923912c87b078da6a2df4cf.png[/img] [img]https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images//44963883/d49ae3c5acbcf6b97c967ca8dab0c33d3d101f73.png[/img] [img]https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images//44963883/b17c2bd81ea4e3f8c05a42988ab36fd798b744af.png[/img] [img]https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images//44963883/9c1a203ef6b64f832e808e620cb212fd18b44574.png[/img] Enemies spawn dynamically along with random events, all the timings and quantities and types of which are determined by the generically named Dungeon Master. The Dungeon Master, which I should probably change the name of *cough,* is simply a bot that takes into account dozens of different factors to choose what is happening at any given time. It tries to keep the game from becoming too easy or too crushingly difficult. Though, sometimes, it decides it wants to drop a horde of elites on your head, along with an unnecessarily difficult event. I could probably talk forever about this because, well, that's how I am, but beyond that I am really happy with how the dungeon system has turned out and, frankly, proud that I was able to make something as robust as it is. Anywho! Next week, we will be talking all about motes - the little critters that will aid you and work as your equipment! [img]https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images//44963883/96d210f81fb6e3be27a1c5e3f390a1043f3b598d.png[/img] Until next time, Lucas *Edit:* My poor grammar again. This seems like it will be a repeating pattern.