Quick little discussion on Valheim’s Proedural Generation.
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Quick little discussion on Valheim’s Proedural Generation.
———————————————————————————–
★Watch live on Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/day9tv/
★Check out my Website: https://day9.tv/store/
★Day[9] Merch: https://day9.tv/store/
Source
You're spot on.
The point Day9 makes at the end of the video is basically one of Mark Rosewaters lessons of game design: "Your players are very good at identifying problems, but not always great at solving them"
Perhaps the lack of variety will be addressed at least in part during the rest of development by adding additional complexity to the generation algorithms.
On a serious note, Day9 raises some really solid points through the whole video but also very succinctly between 19:55–22:42. These are problems that roguelike developers, just by nature of the format, have had to fight with a lot and they've come up with some cool solutions (some similar to what he describes). Very inspiring
Oh Sean. You have so much more content to visit.
I’m not saying it’s necessarily appropriate as a game designer to rely on this – but I think having other players in the game to interact with is a big part of what textured the early game experience of Valheim for me. The points Sean raises about spending too long in the same biomes and same enemy types is fair, but my personal experience with it was spiced up by all the emergent content having friends to interact with brought, like getting lost and stranded when our raft was destroyed. I think the platonic ideal of one of these types of games would be just as gratifying solo, but I’m not sure I have ever seen one that is not made significantly more enjoyable by a couple friends to team up with.
The combat ai is definitely underwhelming
The idea of texture you mentioned is everywhere in dyson sphere program. It's just not "craft a series of more complicated parts to go into the NEXT level of complicated parts", everything has a different mechanic involved as you move to the next "phase" of the game. Best example is how you can get titanium by just flying to another planet, but it's more efficient to use the interplanetary logistics system, you can use coal to get power, or use the dyson sphere. You next need to start to get warp tech so you can access resources from other stars
In spite of it's lack of a good UIX and quality of life features, It's awesome!
Making a half-hour mini-lecture on the procedural generation in a game that you've only played one save file for a few hours is pretty WeirdChamp energy. He hasn't even seen a second roll of the starting area.
You're missing the actual swamp, crypts, portals, sailing, sea monsters, bosses, plains (fuck deathsquitos), mist fields (dont know what this is yet), the kraken.
OMG, Sean explaining things with MS Paint is always so enlightening. Dude knows how to break down a concept. LOVE IT!
I hope as they keep developing this game they add more mini biomes or points of interest, such as the rock formation with trolls. I have some 10+ hours in the game mostly spent building so I havent seen everything (not even close) but I feel like I've already seen some points of interest too many times compared to how many different ones Ive seen.
I mean, it is an early access game…which shouldn’t be an out for developers but don’t judge it after about 5 hours on a single save file from only playing single player.
I feel like you were in the tutorial area the entire time. That world map was gigantic and from what I saw you went like 1km out from your spawn point.
Does he realise he's just describing the other biomes of the game?
Day9 is one of my favourite entertainers, for well over a decade now.
But new players or prospective buyers should take this musing off face value which is – Day9 has only played a few hours, and done very little, and has seen very little.
Almost everything he is asking for, is actually in the game, and it can be unlocked as fast or as slow as you want depending on if you want to focus on progress, or building, or exploring etc.
Really fun to watch how Sean talking about things that already in the game xD ( mountains, swamps, enemy camps… etc )
I actually had some of this on my first island with a mountains terrain on the edge of the black forest. The meadows for me was very samey though.
1:20 and thus the next Yeezs were designed.
The thing about procedural generation is that it needs to have modules in order for the gameplay to still feel meaningful. Have a wilderness area with random things, yes, but have the game also dot that wilderness with certain spots where it will choose from a pool of things and go "I will put a module here".
Camps, Quarries, Dungeons, Towns, Mountains, Dungeons, and Caves can all be modules that break up the map. Maybe there are things from a small list that the game will choose at random. For example: on your first boot of the game the Town Of Sforjsberg has "Farmer Dan is looking for his missing goat." But on the next boot there is no Sforjsberg, but there is still a cabin where "Farmer Dan is looking for his missing daughter". And then the next time the game loads Skullfarmer Danius, Dark Elf tyrant looking for his missing Your Bones and he'll aggro on speech.
The important thing when you are making something randomly generated is that there is still an order to the way players approach the world. Even in a sandbox crafting game like Minecraft, there are still logical cave structures and villages full of people.
I like how a lot of his complaints about the game were things that are literally in the game that he hasn't discovered yet. Whoops
depth
Keeping gamers engaged for more than 2 hours on a game is difficult. This game is not engaging for most of your grinding. That means the drop-off of players will be significant.
I think these comments have all missed his point entirely. It wasn't that these things aren't in the game, it was that each area he visited (so, early on areas) have large portions where the gameplay style is similar. If all of these areas are in the game, why not add small pockets of them all over the world to keep variety up?
Using the phrase wanting more texture with Valheim is kind of funny.
So, reading through the comments, it's true that most of what he's describing is already in the game. However, the underlying point he's making is still sound: The variety doesn't happen quickly enough. Islands are too uniform to keep interest, and the starting islands simply aren't interesting enough. A video game is much like a sales pitch: the first minute buys the next few minutes, which in turn buys the next hour.
What Sean is doing is very constructive criticism: It's his thoughts and feelings after a few hours of gameplay. If the game stays in the state it's in, then it will hemorrhage players before they truly experience what there is to offer, which none of us want since the game's got a solid base with tons of potential.
That river island is actually how my land is in Valheim
Always love hearing your thoughts on game dev.
Sums up a lot of my issues with the game as well. The midgame feels like "Have friends or leave." You need such tremendous amounts of resources from within an area to move to the next tier, which means if you don't have 2-3 other players working alongside you it's going to be a huge grind. That also means you're stuck in Black Forest for ages until you move onto the next actual biome for diversity. And as much as the developers want to be Dark Souls, they don't understand how stamina management in DS is fun, so every enemy encounter becomes either "shoot with bow" or "poke then walk back."
Terraria somehow manages to avoid every single one of these problems.
You create a system that allows you to generate random features and locate the features near to specific starting zones (players). Then, you let the player designate new zones between zones where you can add new features as well. Features would be things like, volcanoes, deserts, mountains, etc. You could add rules for asymmetry or symmetry by designating features towards one particular player or another. So, you could have player 1 (red) have volcanoes, player 2 (blue) have rivers, player 3 (teal) have jungles, etc, or you could have all the features be designated to all the players.
My point is, you have to learn to communicate your ideas for how a world can be generated and look at how a player can identify the different ways to generate that world. The basic way that this is done, is by identifying zones and features. There's a game called Endless Legend that kind of tried to do this sort of thing. But, it's just scraping the bottom of the barrel of that kind of thing.
I realize this doesn't speak to your experience but you're literally so close to reaching everything you want in valheim. Better enemies in the new biomes, better terrain variety, etc
love ya Sean but wtf is this video?
just be a game designer
oh, it's the ol' day9 talks in depth about a game without actually playing through it in depth. The ocean, mountain, and swamp all of the qualities he wants, and he hasn't played enough to realize that.
I hate seeing so many comments here defending the game with some variation of "it's there, just keep playing." If the game doesn't hook you in 8 hours of gameplay, that's inexcusable. Other survival games I've played have had better gameplay and variety of content than Valheim within the first few hours! It's strange to me that so many people have the interest and time to play a game that rewards you very little in the time it would take to play other indie titles to completion. Density of content and pacing are much more important to me in my gaming life.
Reading all these comments "Oh he just hasnt put in the large amount of hours needed to go and visit all the other areas".
His point is to add small variety throughout the whole game's biomes. Obviously Valheim is a great game (so far) and has a variety of places, but "Black forest #1" wont be any different than "Black forest #12" except maybe a boss shrine or a merchant.
I think the conclusion I've come to is that procedural generation sucks, but it's useful when used right. At least until AI gets a LOT better, drop the fantasy that procedural content will produce varied, interesting level design. Where procedural generation works is in games where the core gameplay is solid enough and has enough variety that just playing is fun whatever the world is and the randomness of the world just serves to make it so you can't just map out every movement and go on autopilot. A game like Diablo 3 is great despite the rooms not really changing how you play because the gameplay of building a unique character, slashing your way through monsters with the build you made, and seeking new loot is the fun part. That said, once you've built your character and start getting upgrades less frequently, (say, only needing ancient/primal gear) the game rapidly gets boring because there's also not any new content to look forward to. I actually ended up playing PoE a lot despite liking its systems less because it had a lot of interesting, different, often handcrafted content like unique maps and big bosses.
Exploration is kind of an awful use for procedural content. Why should I get excited what's behind the next hill or in that cave over there when the answer is approximately the same as anywhere else? I enjoyed a game like Breath of the Wild because I knew almost anywhere that drew my attention probably had some cool reward or unexpected content. I went on a long ass quest across the map to get cold resist gear because I was curious about what was on top of a mountain I saw. If I were playing minecraft or something once I've seen one mountain I've seen them all.
Its definitely a pacing issue that Sean is calling out, the game does have the experiences he describes to some degree he just hasn't got to them yet. I don't think the variance is as steep as maybe he describes wanting cause you can brute force through the challenges a little bit. I will say the pacing feels alright for this style of game it could maybe be sped up a smidge. I think in survival sandboxes its good to have a big buffer of sameness in the start to compel you to look for something more once you've established your safety zone. This bit suffers somewhat from procedural in that you could end up with swamp and mountains relatively close to your start… or you could have to make a ship and head to an adjacent landmass to find these new experiences.
There are parametric-based, tile-based or grammar-based methods of PCG. These methods are not exclusive, they can be mixed.It's like a spectrum.
What Sean describes is the more or less "hand-crafted" design of a tile-based method of generating biomes mixed into the parametric overworld generation.
You touched on it a little, but what you are talking about and looking for is the Legend of Zelda. Does everything you're looking for but definitely would be hard to replicate procedurally
Problem: In the first island, you didn't feel like there was enough variety in the things that changed the way you played.
Suggestion: Get a boat.
Thought: The first island is essentially a tutorial. I think it's a bit unreasonable to expect the game to continue to provide new things within said island after 8 hours of play. The game already pushes you towards killing the bosses and the 2nd or 3rd one forces you to get out of the island.
So get off the island.
Compared to Zelda: Breath of the Wild's tutorial section (which is considerably smaller), it shows you the rest of the map on the horizon; giving you a sense of the possibilities with the biomes. So I think the one of the biggest problems with Valheim on this front is that you're typically surrounded by trees when, in reality, the tutorial island should be much smaller and players should probably spawn at the top of a mountain.
On monster variety, Skeletons hit way harder than their Greydwarves counterparts. Greydwarves will run away while Skeletons don't… and most melee Skeletons will wield shields.
Not particularly sure what the ghosts do, but the blobs jump, the leeches poison you, the mosquitos will charge at you, etc… the same way that the boars charge, the deers run and the mammoths will stomp you.
It's not all in the first island because it's easing you into it.