Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night – IGA on procedural generation
In a previous Kickstarter update for Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, it was announced that the game would use procedural generation. This led players to express concerns, and it’s those very concerns that Koji Igarashi chose to address in the latest Kickstarter update.
First, he explains that the development team is going to change the way the environment is visually represented. The reason for that is that at E3, they noticed players sometime had trouble figuring out where a platform was, or if a specific element in a level was something they could go through or not. Their solution? Make the “front” side of platforms brighter, and more distant parts of the environments darker.
About procedural generation, Koji Igarashi explains that before they chose to use it, they worked on environments on a texture-by-texture basis. This was a rather time-consuming method, made even worse by the fact thatBloodstained: Ritual of the Night’s world is pretty big. As you can imagine, trying to add variation manually would take way too much time.
And it’s not so much to save time but to use time more efficiently that developers chose to go with procedural generation. Basically, they’re using it to auto-generate environmental grime and destruction effects (not build entire levels).
Here’s some screenshots and a video showcasing procedural generation, used to generate destruction effects with the same assets (top is without procedural generation, bottom is with it):
Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night will be released in 2018.
Source: Koji Igarashi (Kickstarter)
