NOTE: this has changed a bit in light of the lore. Shouldn't be bad though. Just have to have a big complex of Aleph quettan somewhere and find the exact spot in that mesh as well. Putting the grid firmly in map{} will help here a lot.
Also will want to have transports, altered meta-room generation and fun stuff like windows around the edges since the map is finite now.
Having a game goal implies that the map should change from seed to seed, which might be acceptable.
the goal is to go to some specified room and enter the specified painting to a specific coordinate. The room can be reasonably close but the painting instructions are going to be deep enough that you can't find it on your own.
Uses the clue system of crazy diamond's, with the actual Clues scattered in meta-game info plates.
So basically the same game goal / system as many of my games. It definitely serves to give the overall game a purpose however.
Red rooms (also your starting point) are along a grid, maybe 3x3 or 4x4. There are two blue exits along the outer edge.
Blue rooms are corridors that encircle each red grid and connect with various lines. The innards here that are large enough and aren't red grids are Green Rooms, gated behind Green Doors.
Green rooms are geometrical objects and the overall generation plays out like this -- the objects may also be fractals so individual rooms also take on that shape, or it's a bunch of that shape in sequence or just one large one -- not sure what I want yet. But like triangles, hexagons, double spirals etc inspired by shatterloop dungeon rooms. Each Green room has a yellow transporter somewhere. These lead to Yellow rooms, which aren't on the main map in any capacity.
Yellow transports go to that floor's yellow room, which has transports arranged in a circle to different parts of that node floor in green machine rooms. There's also a center yellow transport that goes up a level of scale -- now the ring will transport you to yellow rooms in other nodes. Go up again and get another level of scale of nodes, etc. These meta-yellow nodes dont exist on the map. At the top level and working your way in that direction you can reach the edges of the ship, which ties into the plot. There's also a node somewhere (depending on the seed but never the origin or close) that is nothing but Aleph quettan paintings which again ties into the plot and game progression.
Basic Lock structuring
Red rooms contain red keys and 2+ blue keys (the origin contains exactly 2 to up the challenge a bit). They're gated by red doors, with the entrances into blue rooms gated by blue doors.
Blue rooms contain a mix of red, blue and green keys, with green keys being rare. Blue rooms are gated by a mixture of blue and red doors, with entrances into red rooms always being locked by blue doors and entrances into green rooms always locked by green doors.
Green rooms contain a mix of green keys and yellow keys. Green rooms are gated by green doors, with Transports gated by yellow doors -- transports appear inside the room rather than being on an edge -- the transport is probably pretty far away. Each Green complex has a yellow transport somewhere so there's a fixed amount of green rooms.
Yellow rooms are gated by yellow keys and don't themselves contain keys.
Cubing
Each red grid is instead a red cube, so you can go up or down -- these routes are gated by cyan doors. Cyan keys are rare and scattered fairly randomly throughout the maze but there's only one in a fixed spot in floor 0 of the origin red room.
Green rooms have gated floors as well, however they're set so that they overlap anywhere but floor 0 so like floor 1 is the bottom of a 3-high cube, floor -1 is the top of one, and floor 0 doesn't have one.
Each node has a fixed size, which should be like 7 floors centered at floor 0, depending on that node's cube spread -- if grids are instead 5 high, it would instead be 11 high. Idk what the formula is exactly yet.
Meta-mapping
Each one of these 3D mazes is known as a "node". The structure here isn't super obvious since you're looking at individual rooms rather than the map as a whole, though there might be a way to see that as well.
Within a node there will be two-way transports scattered around (but never in the origin red room) that go elsewhere, gated behind orange doors. These can pair to different floors -- they're basically node shortcuts to make speedruns more interesting. Orange keys appear randomly on floors that aren't zero.
Nodes also connect to all nodes adjacent to them via 1-3 links, gated behind an orange door. They should at least appear along the appropriate "node edge" where possible.
Each floor has a yellow room somewhere and this forms part of the node generative structure (with blue Corridor rooms encircling it like normal). Yellow rooms always appear at the same coordinate in the node cube. Cyan doors allow traversal up to the top and bottom of this "elevator".
Yellow rooms at the bottom level have access back into the node at large at their physical location in exactly one exit gated by a yellow door.
Some nodes dont have the normal painting structures and are instead full of ship components as a kind of lore / Easter egg type of thing. These will never be the origin or close to it in the overall ship layout, but it's pretty random overall. They also won't overlap with the Aleph quettan location -- that will instead just replace whatever else was there.
Some gates need to be unlocked -- this won't happen in the origin red cube in any capacity, but elsewhere you can defo find unlocked gates.
Nodes will generate a set of properties like overall node layout, floors, key type distribution, unlocked door distribution and maybe painting type distribution.
Maps and Scanning
You should be able to get some kind of mapping and scanning technology:
Identify where rare keys are within your current complex.
Get an overall sense of what the floor looks like. Maybe even where orange nodes are.
Scan nodes to see their properties.
The various functionalities here along with puzzle-consumable items should be part of a really reaaaaallly basic items system -- base items can be found as secondary goals in paintings or just sitting by themselves in rooms (but never the origin). Maybe some type of handcrafted crafting system that combines base items together into different things -- this would increase the scope of the game a bit but be worth it for the increased engagement in navigating these complex clusterfucks.
Red paintings should be my art within one of the psychedelic colored albums (the room determines the album)
Blue paintings should be black and white art albums, assuming that's feasible in the engine.
Green paintings should be various shapes as the starting image, like a bunch of triangles or whatever.
Yellow paintings should be straight noise like the engine is currentManifold. Or alternately some base source image that's polar-manipped a bunch of weird ways. Maybe the earth or something to give it that extra "oh fuck the aliens know about us" thing.
Orange paintings should be sections of the times table manifold.
Aleph Quettan paintings should use royalty-free images from a limited set. I want to make the actual image set stuff that's vaguely weird like surreal paintings or w/e to increase the unsettling nature of the game.
Any painting in this engine should create an image bigger than the viewpoint and as you scale down bring in the appropriate pixels or start fractallizing as needed. I'll need to change the engine a bit to accommodate this, but it'll be neat to have actual images in there.
Consumable items can be used once per painting and recharge if you reset or go to a different painting. They do various things:
Paintings have a fixed "bottom" to the zoom, and it's possible to exceed it with this type of item.
Create stuff at the current level of scale -- this won't appear at higher scales but it'll chunkify at lower levels, giving you "bridges" and whatnot. It also can't replace items.
Transport you elsewhere in the viewport.
Alter your aspect range so you can step on adjacent tiles better.
Change the way fractals generate. Some are definitely gonna be harder to navigate than others.
Do hue shifts or upsatting or whatever at the current level of scale.
Base items are retrievable in the following ways:
They exist at scale 1 or 2 (not 0) and can be picked up like you were picking up the quettan core. Each painting should tell you what you haven't collected yet so you have to explore to find them.
They can be found in Rooms by themselves and collected accordingly.
Transformer Fixtures
Outside the origin cube, you can occasionally find Transformer fixtures. These will open a menu that lets you:
Turn base items and/or consumables and/or scanning/mapping upgrades into other consumables and/or mapping upgrades and/or base items. This is all completely gloriously random. Some are good transformations, some suck, some are just context-specific. This kind of thing makes Journaling in this game more important (as well as game wikis and such in the social sphere), which is a good thing.
When generating green rooms, assign each one a yellow transport and note its angle and distance relative to the yellow room.
Yellow transports are always locked by yellow doors and look a bit differently from other doors but are essentially like staircases. Make sure rooms with a yellow transport *and* Both up and down stairs still work navigation-wise.
The yellow room splays out each yellow door according to its distance and angle. If there's an overlap, make a promise to send you to a random door in that direction.
The yellow doors should do what you expect, including the promise established in the previous point.
Make sure unlocking transport doors from either side unlocks it from the other side too.
Yellow rooms should have yellow doors connecting them to whatever they're connected to in the map.
The Centerpoint should be a special door that jumps up the next level of scale. This is where things start to become a serpentine clusterfuck.
Upscaling
Each yellow room has cyan doors that allow you to go up or down to the limits of the node. Idk how the layout here influences yellow room transports but just make sure things are still accessible.
When you upscale, generate a yellow room nowhere in particular (depending on what the engine looks like).
So level 0 yellow rooms allow you access to the green rooms and other floors of the node. This has already been established, now we're talking about level 1 yellow rooms.
Each NxNxN of Nodes should be in a kind of "chunk". There will be 3 yellow rooms in this space, corresponding to the three arises of travel, the x and y rooms spacious g out in that kind of grid. I have no idea how I'm setting this up yet but I want -5 on one side and +5 on the other with squares allowing subvector transport. Having there be 10x10 exits is helpful for my own sanity as scaling is then understandably logarithmic. If that isn't possible in the existing mapping engine, then build a new one where it does work - yellow rooms don't have anything else in them so this is perfectly fine. Would prefer to keep it on the same engine however, even if I have to downscale tiles a bit to accomodate.
Each center goes to another level of this mapping along the same axis, so as you cross center rooms the scale increases logarithmically. This should proceed until it hits the arbitrary limits defined by the ship. The ship should be cubic for my own sanity, and heck that fits into the Lore better anyway.
Not sure how you change axises, but want this to be UX friendly in some way other than selecting the axis every single fucking time.
Regardless though every transport on this system is gated by yellow doors that unlock in both directions and visibly unlock on all three axises.
