Hi all. We're CardboardTV, and we're making LONGHOUSE, a top-down roguelike set in a house that doesn't follow the rules of houses. It's an interpretation of Hell, drawn in an NES style at 256x224.  We're gonna go crazy with the horror in this one - our goal is to see how scary we can make an 8-bit-style game.  Basically if we can scare ourselves, that'll tell us we've succeeded.

You play as a guy named Cedric. Each floor is a maze of long corridors and rooms that connect like a dream instead of a floor plan. Death is permanent, and every floor is procedurally generated.

Two layers

Each floor has two layers. The Above holds the monsters, pits and hazards. The Floorboards lie underneath, a quiet blue copy of the same floor with a few walls moved. No monsters go down there. Supplies, weapons and upgrades do. You drop through holes in the floor to get there and climb back up through beds. A bed doesn't always put you back where you started. Holes that sparkle always lead to something good.

Light and dark

Many rooms are dark. In the dark, monsters can't see you, but you can't see the walls, doors or pits. A match lights the area around you for a few seconds, and while it burns every monster in the room can see you. In lit rooms you can hide in shadows. Monsters stay in their own rooms, and they only notice you when you encroach on their space.

Pits

The pits are bottomless. You can't walk into one by accident, but some monsters can push you. Part of the game is learning which ones.

Where it's at

The engine, the two layers, darkness, matches, the gun and the first monsters all work on a hand-made test floor. Right now we're building the floor generator. It mixes hand-made pieces into new floors and checks that every floor can be finished. The game isn't downloadable yet. The project page holds the devlog, where we'll post progress, design notes and art.

https://inkajoo.itch.io/longhouse/devlog

Design and programming by Roger Levy. Art by TheCreator. Built in our in-house engine, SUPERSHOW, written in Forth.

Thanks for reading. Questions and comments are welcome.

I've added a couple posts about the procedural map generator in LONGHOUSE.  

The most standout thing is how AI enabled me to design a generator unlike anything I've come across.  It took my goals and walked me through dozens of contingencies, which I then evaluated and resolved.

The goal is to program a game that can design levels as I would.  Randomness and algorithms will take a backseat to a number of ledgers which will step through all of the player's potential "paths", and various rules will govern how values like difficulty, fear, and meanness rise and fall over the course of their time in the level and what prefabs the generator selects, how many and what types of enemies to place etc.  I define where these values go in various situations, so it's not arbitrary, giving the game a distinct character.

It won't be quite at the level of obsessive artistry I pour into levels, and puzzles are not likely to be prominent or very deep, if it has any at all, but it should be much less random-feeling than other roguelikes.  Players are likely to feel that they are being told a sensible "story".  That's the goal, anyway.  I'm pretty confident about it.

https://inkajoo.itch.io/longhouse/devlog/1753692/progress-on-the-generator

https://inkajoo.itch.io/longhouse/devlog/1748469/procedural-generation-in-longho...