Adding deep water and clearable rubble to dungeons
Swimming through dungeon pools on a breath timer that ends in drowning, and rubble the party digs through over a minute of game time while the noise draws monsters.
Dungeons have deep water and rubble now. Deep water is swum, not waded, and the party has 20 seconds of breath before it starts drowning. Rubble blocks a corridor until the party digs through it, which takes about a minute of game time and makes enough noise to bring monsters.
The film’s frames in order. Watch the portraits flash red when the breath runs out, and the heap shrink as it’s cleared.
They’re the next two pieces from the list of what the dungeon kit was missing.
How does swimming work in a dungeon?
The overworld already had swimming, so deep water uses the same code instead of a second version. Swimming means half the walking speed, no running, no jumping and no attacks. A deep square is marked by putting a deep_water thing on a normal shallow water square, one per square, so I didn’t need a new tile type and the phone designer page offers it like any other piece.
I didn’t want to dig holes in the dungeon floor for pools, because then the party needs a way to climb out at every edge. So in a dungeon the party’s body stays on the floor and only the camera drops to the water surface, 0.28 meters up. The surface is dark and almost opaque, so you can’t see the floor under it.
How does drowning work?
The swim line under the crosshair counts down the breath, 20 game seconds of it. When it runs out the line says DROWNING, and every member who’s still alive loses 3 health every 2 seconds, no matter their armor. As soon as the party’s out of the deep water the damage stops and the breath refills at 4 seconds per game second. The breath is saved, so a load in the middle of a swim doesn’t reset it.
Walking monsters never go into deep water, but flyers cross it. Nothing swims after the party yet.
The dungeon importer refuses deep water that doesn’t make sense. That means deep water on a square that isn’t water, anything standing in it like a chest or a ladder, or any part of the dungeon you can only reach by swimming more than 16 squares in a row. Both reach checkers agree on that: a 16 square canal passes and a 17 square one fails.
How does rubble get cleared?
Rubble is a new fixture type with three looks: fallen ceiling, slag or scrap. While it’s there it blocks walking, flying, sight and shots. Pressing E starts clearing it and pressing E again stops. It takes 60 game seconds with all four members up, and longer with fewer, because the time is 60 x 4 divided by the members still standing. The party has to stay within 3.4 meters for the work to go on. Walking off keeps the progress, and a half-cleared heap is saved that way.
The heap shrinks from the top as it goes and leaves a low spill of debris you can walk over. Starting and finishing both alert every living monster within 18 meters, so clearing rubble in a dangerous part of a dungeon is a real choice.
I wanted a tool to make it faster, but the game doesn’t have an item that fits yet, so more hands is the speed-up for now.
Where does the generator put them?
Every flooded room has a 50% chance of a deep pool in its middle, with a ring of shallows around it. Squares next to anything standing in the room stay shallow, and a shallow path runs from each of those things to the edge, so nothing ends up on an island. Over 20 test dungeons that made 5 pools out of 30 flooded rooms.
On 30% of floors, one pile of rubble goes on a straight corridor that isn’t the only way through. Earlier the same day I’d fixed a bug where the generator treated a pit as a wall when deciding a door was the only way through, and then the pit moved. So this step counts anything that might open or move later as passable, pits included. Over the same 20 dungeons, rubble landed on 17 of 60 floors.
All of these numbers are placeholders until I’ve played them.