Text-based, running off the engine used in Fishing/Fleet/Courier.
A gigantic fractal-procgen library. Contains various types of rooms in a fixed Game Progression and also contains copious amounts of Books.
Books are procedurally-generated in random languages and contain color grids, text and other content. They'll have 100-900 pages and you can read it in their entirety. They'll also very rarely contain useful english information which is either Lore or forms part of the Clue system.
The game is in the psychological/unexplained horror genre. The procedural generation is labyrinthine and confusing, sometimes doesn't make physical sense, the books are alien and unsettling, and there are also other elements that give it a spooky and unsettling vibe, with more standard demonic/etc stuff in the Basement levels.
Heavily inspired by House of Leaves, there are spiral staircases, obviously the overall infinite structure, things similar to Minotaurs that wait in the shadows, etc, and a lot of general unexplained weirdness.
There's a solid Game Progression that has largely to do with the inventory and also the Clues system. Some areas are gated off (such as the basement) until the game progression level has been achieved.
Individual library buildings are laid out like this, each building letter connects to other letters on the same row or column, so L connects to G, K, M and Q.
They also wrap around, so E will connect to D and J but also to Y and A.
Foyers
Each building has a Foyer which is the top-level location. It connects to:
Other building Foyers along the library layout seen above.
two-way access into The Z-Spiral.
Open staircases into 2-5 floors of Hub Stars.
The Overseer room for the entire Floor. This isn't accessible from this side.
The Administration Complex for the Building. The rooms in here tell you Building and Floor variables. The Administration Complex is always locked with one of the 36 keys.
Spirals
There are several types of Spiral Staircases known as Spirals in my notes, such as the Z-Spiral. They're all contain an origin and are infinite in both directions.
The pattern of locations they connect to is chosen from a fixed list and procgen non-repeating -- this works by picking two from the list per random iteration and then %2=0 gives you the first and %2=1 gives you the second.
The seeding is based on the location that you came from, so while the origin node is 2-way, every other connection is one-way:
Going into the same origin location further down, if entered again will spawn you back at the origin.
Going into a different location and entered again will reseed the entire spiral and go to the origin here.
To make this a bit more descriptive-sensible, any connection other than the origin is some kind of mirage/portal thing that occasionally shimmers or distorts.
Each Spiral Entrance will have a Filing Cabinet next to it that contains information telling you the pattern of the stair. These are always locked with one of the 36 Keys.
The Z-Spiral
With that out of the way, the Z-Spiral connects to:
All Foyers in some kind of spiral pattern, so for example:
A=01
B=02
C=03
D=04
E=05
F=16
G=17
H=18
I=19
J=06
K=15
L=24
M=25
N=20
O=07
P=14
Q=23
R=22
S=21
T=08
U=13
V=12
W=11
X=10
Y=09
However, the other direction could've been chosen, or since the building entrances wrap, it could instead be:
G
H
I
J
F
L
M
N
O
K
Q
R
S
T
P
V
W
X
Y
U
B
C
D
E
A
and then:
G=09
H=08
I=07
J=06
F=05
L=10
M=21
N=20
O=19
K=04
Q=11
R=22
S=25
T=18
P=03
V=12
W=23
X=24
Y=17
U=02
B=13
C=14
D=15
E=16
A=01
After the 25th point it'll connect to an area known as The Entrance and then pick a new spiral pattern. Going up will also pick a different spiral pattern that works similarly.
To ease navigation, you actually get several entrances at once per Z-building location, maybe 5 at a time.
Like other Spirals, anything other than the origin is a one-way connection, so if you enter the G foyer and then go back out, you'd get a bunch of spirals centered on G.
The Entrance
The Entrance has rows of chairs, a vending and drink machine with a small number of items, and an exit to The Void.
The Void
The Void is an infinite area where you have ground and air but everything is completely black. There's different textures at your feet probably, gravel or concrete or grass but it's all extremely dark.
The further out you get, the more the darkness seems to envelop you until it consumes you completely, there's some kind of horror cutscene and you finish reading this description from a handcrafted book location (known as an End Page), teleporting to that location and that part of the book there.
If you have a Flashlight, you can shine it on the darknesses here to get them to move, which fits into the Game Progression.
The coordinate system here is a polar coordinate system with the library in the center -- the library is a big polar circle of the Z building surrounding the 25 towers of the Library, which are full of weird geometric shapes. If you stay close to the Library you can see various buildings and their number of hub corridors and "shape", which is a good way of scanning them in bulk. There also isn't much in the way of Darkness consuming you out here, though there is if you get too far out. Directions adjust angle and distance, where distance determines the likelihood of the darkness swallowing you but also how much of each building you're able to see.
There's exactly one entrance back into the library, at the origin point of 0 degrees and 0 distance. The Z-spiral will preserve wherever you were in the Z-spiral (and which one it was), so the Entrance is a 2-way connection.
The Void makes you hungrier than other locations, so bringing snacks is important for exploring it. If you get Weak out here you instead get a different horror ending, which goes to a different End Book.
Hub stars take a shape like this, with each line indicating a corridor. There are several variables in play, which are determined by the building:
Lines -- how many lines there are. So 4 on the left one, and 5 on the other.
Direction -- whether new corridors come out the right or the left. In the image above they're both coming out of the right.
Size -- the overall length of each corridor. This number is a number of nodes.
Connection -- Which node of a corridor the next corridor connects to, and also which node the current corridor comes out of if you move back through it. This number will be less than the size.
Layers -- [2-5]. How many layers of stars there are.
These variables are distributed among the 25 buildings rather than random. So you get an equal amount (roughly) of 3-line stars as 6-line ones, an equal amount of long v short, etc.
Building Random Variables
Buildings also can have other variables, which are random rather than distributed:
# of elevators per floor.
Chance of a staircase being OFF.
??? Section size? Might be better distributed or floor-based. Same deal with other section variables. TODO:
Floor Random Variables
Floors have their own Random Variables:
# of building spirals
Likelihood of top-level doors being locked.
Likelihood of Doors appearing in Nodes.
Likelihood of Doors creating Sections.
More on Hub Stars
Hub Stars have entry points through one of the corridors at the max distance from the polygon in the middle. This corridor is marked A, and the letter increases by the branches.
Each corridor node of a hub star can connect to:
The Electrical room for the entire Floor.
The Warehouse for the entire Building. There's exactly one of these per building, and it's never on the 13th floor.
A non-hub star, which has the shape of the hub stars.
Anything that corridors could connect to.
Corridors
Corridors (of any kind) can connect to:
Additional corridor stars. This can be a fractal via the Layers variable (starting with the Hub corridor and going down). Substars will be marked with alternating numbers and letters and separated with :, so the address of a low-level corridor on floor 51 of building G might be G51:A1B:
Elevators -- There's a fixed amount per floor, this amount being based on the building. Each floor will have the same amount of elevators and their location is easily retrievable so they'll actually work.
Staircase -- Each building creates a staircase for every single star and then, while making sure at least one low-level one definitely works, will selectively turn them on or off for each Floor. If it's on, there'll be an entrance here. If it's off for the floor then that particular staircase won't connect to the floor here. There will however always be at least one per floor, though the specific line used will change each floor.
Building Spiral -- Each floor generates some amount of building spirals, which exist in specific corridors and might exist in a specific section of that corridor. If the engine determines one exists in the current corridor then by golly it will. Building Spirals will have a locked Filing Cabinet in front of it that tells you where the staircase goes when going up or down. This information is finite despite the actual data being infinite, it's quite large though.
After the above checks are done, nodes will generate one of the below:
Door -- Low-level corridors are never locked, but top-level corridors likely are. Locked doors require one of the 36 keys in order to go through. Each corridor will have at least one Door, and will have at least one Section behind a door, but doors can also lead to brick walls or other horror-type stuff, including locked doors.
Blank -- The node is unused. As mentioned above, you'll never have a corridor with nothing in it whatsoever.
Each section has "Mouths" that go to other sections that can be:
In the same corridor
In a different corridor of the same star
Somewhere else on the floor
Local Mouths Algorithm
Each section is arranged in sequence in a corridor -- this is already happening with the coordinate system. Corridors also need to be arranged -- again, this is already happening.
Each section is assigned a "charm" out of a fixed list by seeding the section coordinate, say red/blue/green. It's also assigned whether that's an increasing or decreasing charm.
Charms of the same color will connect in the direction where they point towards each other. The number of the same type of charm as you along the route will extend your route. So for example in a 11-section system:
Room #
Color
Direction
Network
1
red
down
3
2
blue
down
5
3
red
up
1
4
green
up
OON
5
blue
up
2
6
blue
down
9
7
green
down
11
8
green
down
10
9
blue
up
6
10
green
up
8
11
green
up
7
#4 goes up a corridor to get the next part of its network.
#7 goes to #11 rather than #10 because it has (1) charm identical to it along its route (#8), so it skips (1) connection. If there was another green-down in there, it would go even further.
Multi Connections
To get multiple connections like this, you just generate additional charms by seeding both the section coordinate and the network position -- so like the above list is the [section_coord,0] assignment, whereas the next one would be the [section_coord,1] assignent.
If a connection is identical to a previous pairing, then I guess that's okay, there's just multiple shortcuts between sections.
Connection Scaling
To scale this in an interesting way:
Each corridor node determines which scale of corridors to look at -- a lot of this depends on how many corridors there are.
Nodes in the same position are then linked by charming the corridors at that level of scale and running a similar algorithm to find connection points.
Foolproofing
If for whatever reason you arrive back at the origin without making a connection, then there is no connection. It definitely doesn't need to go on forever.
Infrastructure
To support this system, I need to be able to search the entire corridor/section tree very easily and sequentially. I need full infrastructure for this and probably other projects as well.
Mouths Location / Amount
The amount of local mouths and the amount of global mouths is building-specific and distributed.
The actual location of mouths in a section is procedurally generated based on the section, however it can't be in the starting room or in a room with a building spiral connection. They should maybe ideally be distributed throughout the grid along with the entrance and building spirals.
Building spirals are 1-way connections between rooms or corridors and other corridors/rooms. They serve to make navigation extra extra confusing. Like the Z-spiral they're infinite in both directions, and the origin point dictates the staircase's properties, with some additional caveats:
Going up on a spiral staircase will make you go down some number of floors, and this wraps. Going down makes you go up and this wraps. This should feel extra eldritch. Good way to reach the top of the building easily however.
The amount of floor skipping per staircase floor you actually do is dictated by the origin. It can be as low as 0.25, in which case every four increases will go to a new floor, or as high as 1/4 the total number of floors in the building, rounded down. The tally is either maintained internally or mathematical. Also these numbers will change because I want to have multiple connections per floor so navigation is less grindy.
They can connect to rooms or corridors without limits. If it would connect to something it would've connected to on the floor closer to the origin, it'll increment by 1.
There is at least one building spiral per corridor which is either in the corridor or in one of the sections, but they have fairly random distribution otherwise, with the chance of them appearing being dictated by the building:floor. There should be zero in the hub corridor.
If a building spiral reaches the 13th floor, things will be pretty weird at the entrance points but you won't be able to actually enter the 13th floor in this way -- that exclusively requires staircases.
Building spirals will also connect to Tool Rooms, where you can get screwdrivers and pliers. There's only one tool room per spiral staircase -- once exhausted of resources, you need to go back.
When Building spirals connect to a section, they can't exit at a mouth, entrance or other spiral staircase.
Building spirals that connect to corridors will pick the ones that have brick walls/etc behind them. If they don't exist, then you'll instead get an inaccessible brick wall (or some other horror thing) on the side of the building spiral.
The clue system should ideally tie into all potential routes so you actually have to navigate the weird spaces to some extent.
Each building has some number of floors. Idk the number but definitely always more than 13. Probably maxes around 51 or so.
Elevator Generation
Each building generates some amount of elevators -- ideally whatever is most navigable given the max size of corridors (5-layer 7-stars yield 16k). These are given unique ids, probably numbers.
Each floor (other than the 13th) distributes these through its corridors and subcorridors so a corridor won't contain more than one and some corridors are going to lack them. There shouldn't ever be one on the hub corridor, you have to actually explore and find them.
When going up a floor, you go to the same id on the corresponding floor. So you're going to move around geometrically a lot by design.
Elevators
Elevators can be accessed once they're turned on by the building's Electrical Room.
They let you go to any floor except the 13th.
They have a keypad with alien symbols -- if you input the right passcode you can go to the Sub-basements of that particular elevator node.
Stairwells
One corridor that isn't a hub corridor is chosen at random on each floor and set somewhere to be the failsafe stairwell for that floor.
Each corridor that isn't a hub corridor has its own stairwell. It is either OFF or ON -- if ON, it'll be accessible corridor-side.
Going up a stairwell will go to the same node coordinate on the next (or previous) floor, provided that the stairwell in that location is ON.
The failsafe stairwell for each floor is always ON.
The 13th floor is also always ON, and also always locked with the key of the building name (so key D unlocks building D's 13th floor).
Other floors can be locked.
The rate of stairwell access and the rate of stairwell locking are both variables that are dictated by the building. The procgen variables should be distributed.
Stairwells contain entrances to Ventilation Shafts at each level, which requires a Screwdriver to enter. They also have a locked Filing Cabinet that tells you the location of Overseer Offices within the ventilation maze, which is the only way into them.
Sub-basements are lit by candles, medieval technology (or even older), and have cobwebs and whatnot, in addition to more horror elements.
They're accessed by entering the code received from a GITD Book into any elevator. The code is different between seeds.
Sub-basements contain a wide room (with the oldschool aesthetic going on) with entrances into three things:
Art Galleries
Museums
The Substair for the building.
The Substair
The substair is a spiral staircase that randomly(%2) connects all sub-basements together with one-way connections. There's an N% chance of the entrance to the Master Stair instead appearing -- this chance is based on the building and distributed.
A filing cabinet at the entrance of the substair will help you pin down exactly where the Master Stair entrance is, if one is reasonably close.
The Master Stair
The Master Stair runs spirals around building substairs in a similar way to how the Z-building works -- however before the spiral algorithm takes place, the buildings are randomly moved to new positions on the grid so while you can map where things are, it's a lot trickier. The Filing Cabinet is at least helpful.
At the very end of the spiral path there will be an entrance into The Heart -- this door has the entirety of websafe unicode in it and you have to enter a specific passcode to enter (which changes from seed to seed).
Each Master Stair entrance into a Substair also contains a wall of Scrolls which are like Books but English-based, a lot longer, and contain the clues needed to unlock the Heart.
Sections are behind the doors in Corridors, which may be locked -- at least one door in a corridor won't be locked.
They're essentially grids of rooms that are connected together using the fleet grid algorithm, with possibly more than 2 connections (it's a Floor variable).
Sections have several types of rooms:
Stacks -- contains shelves of Books and some Desks. Most rooms are Stacks rooms.
Study halls -- contains rows and columns of desks, no books. Can contain doors to Offices, but it's rarer. Various OON books here and a Sticky Note somewhere for the first tier of Clue.
Lounges -- contain Vending Machines and Tables and Chairs, Couches, etc. Also contain entrances to 2-5 Bathrooms indicated by strange symbols. Bathrooms are basically just infinite and possibly hyperbolic spaces and contain horror elements.
Storage Rooms -- Contain various random information that's maybe helpful but probably not and also very likely a Key somewhere. Also Books in 3-5 fixed langugages, but these books are out-of-network so won't contain clues or anything, they're in the same category as warehouse books. Everything here is highly messy and disorganized. Presumably these will tell you where the Sticky Notes in the rest of the Section actually are. The generation of desks/folders/etc is fractal like ship components in Automaton or I guess like the game in general.
Welcome Rooms -- Contain a few OON books on display, all of which are by the same author and have the same language per kiosk, with posters and other information about the books herein. Contain doors to Offices, which are always locked and may also go to something other than Offices. They also have a much better chance of containing Paintings.
Blueprint Rooms -- Assuming you're on the 13th floor (and can deal with the horror events being dialed up a notch) there will likely be Blueprint Rooms as well. These contain Clues on where the Warehouse room for the Building is, Clues on the locations of Toolboxes that contain flashlights, and possibly other (more useful) scanning abilities.
There should be a lot of variety in these types -- random art displays, paintings, the color and composition of shelves, room shape and height, ceiling fans, wallpaper or painted walls, etc. A lot should be hexagonal as a nod to Borges.
The entrance to every section should be a Welcome Room, however it will not contain Offices. Or anything else -- building spiral and mouth locations are scattered throughout the other types of Rooms.
Outside of stuff that's relevant to Game Progression, this post will cover all other game mechanics.
Inventory
Your inventory is divided into two parts:
Keys -- one of 36 keys. These are reusable and you can only carry one of each type at a time.
Consumables -- Items that are used and you can carry an infinite amount of them. If you try to pick up a key you already have, it'll go here as "Extra $ Key".
Consumables should be categorized in some cases, such as Money, Pliers and Batteries, to cut down on inventory space.
Keys and Locked Doors
Doors and Filing Cabinets can be Locked, in which case you need the appropriate key to unlock the door. Door unlocks aren't saved as data, you can just go through that area if you have that key.
Pliers
Tool Rooms in Building Spirals will occasionally generate Pliers, which are items that let you turn some set of extra keys into some other set of keys. So a AH-YK4 plier would let you turn an extra A key and an extra H key into a Y key, K key or 4 key.
This manipulation can only happen on a Clamp Table, which is a fixture found in Tool Rooms to simplify the menus a bit. You can however carry as many pliers as you want to other Tool Rooms, assuming there aren't inventory limits (I'm considering it).
Hunger and Thirst
You get hungry and thirsty, depending on what the last thing you ate and drink were -- salty foods will increase thirst and "thick" drinks like juices will recover less thirst. Foods that contain protein and/or fat will be more satiating.
If you die of Hunger or Thirst, you'll respawn at the appropriate End Book with both hunger and thirst reset. Very annoying since you get teleported waaaay far away from where you were. There should also be different "endings" depending on *where* you die of hunger or thirst.
When your hunger or thirst get to that level, you'll see them in addition to the coordinate of the appropriate end book, which slowly gets bigger and bigger until you teleport there. So you can strategically use hunger/thirst resets to teleport to specific locations.
Hunger and Thirst go up as you move around -- which you do a lot of. It isn't horribly annoying though, just something to check on a couple times an hour.
Vending Machines
Vending Machines contain Snacks (for hunger) and Drinks (for thirst). They cost money to operate, and to be as immersive as possible, the money is actual money and you get change accordingly. Some money can be found at the bottom of vending machines usually, and they're also scattered.
Vending machines don't restock.
They contain immersive items of many varieties that increase/decrease hunger and thirst in different ways for different price points. Meat/cheese is going to be the most satiating, with unflavored carby things (like popcorn) being the worst. Drinks can occasionally also sate hunger, but this is rare and expensive.
Assuming there are no inventory limits, you can carry as many drinks or snacks as you can buy.
Lounges may also contain unopened drinks or snacks for free.
Sleepiness
Traversing staircases of any type will increase sleepiness, as will reading anything whatsoever (filing cabinets, books, clues, etc).
If you get too sleepy, you'll get Exhausted, which means every action will take real time and you'll have an opportunity to take a nap wherever you are on the floor -- this might work and might instead teleport you to an End Book.
You can take a Nap in a Desk -- this will teleport you to another Desk at a fixed location for that desk.
You can also sleep in Lounge Armchairs or Couches -- these will recover more sleep (depending on the fixture), and won't teleport you, but the object will disappear and you'll mysteriously wake up on the floor.
