Fun with Objects Release Announcement

Hi everyone,

We know you’re all anxiously awaiting the Fun with Objects update. We wanted to let you know that, after careful deliberation, we’ve decided to break this update into two parts.

Everything in Dungeon Alchemist has received such a massive overhaul that developing and testing all the features in this update would push the release further than we’d like. So, in order to get these features to all of you as soon as possible, we’re splitting the update and are hoping to release the first part early July this year.

The first part of the update will contain the (literal) ground works: multi-level buildings, roofs,.. The second part will deliver on more specific Fun with Objects features, like full 3D rotation and multi-object selection.

You’ll notice in the first part that Dungeon Alchemist has changed drastically: maps are no longer limited to one level, and you’ll be able to freely create buildings at multiple levels (even underground!). We’ve also given you more control over lighting, with the introduction of abstract lights (lights from an invisible source), and all AI’s have received a massive overhaul.

You might wonder why this update is taking so long. Ever since we started Dungeon Alchemist people have been asking for roofs over their buildings. A fair request, and something we’ve been meaning to tackle for a long time. This seemed as good a time as any to start.

One of the first things we noticed about roofs is that they are not rooms: it’s perfectly possible to create any given shape between two floors that is neither the room above or the room below. Check out the image below for an example of how weird these shapes can get.

An example of the strange shapes a roof could take

To fix this, we needed to write a new roof border system, that can create borders of any given size and fill odd shapes seamlessly. That finished, it became clear that it was very easy to mistake those flat roofs and roof borders for regular rooms. Not being able to manipulate them in the same way we’re used to felt off and buggy. There was the added issue that our flat roofs did not look very roof-like, further confusing everyone.

We needed a way to clearly distinguish our roofs from our rooms system, and the most straightforward way was to finally tackle the thing we’ve been dreading from the start: slanted roofs.

Not just slanted roofs, but slanted roofs auto-generated over any given stupidly impossible shape. That’s where we ventured into unexplored development territory. There was no algorithm available on earth that accurately covered all our use cases. So we had to develop one. The good news: we did. Dungeon Alchemist is now capable of generating any given themed roof in milliseconds. This is absolutely groundbreaking, and we are not aware of any other software that does this. The bad news, of course, is that getting this to work took us far longer than initially expected.

There is a vast amount of features related to Fun with Objects that we’re actively developing, but it seemed unfair to make everyone wait until we’ve finalised those, too. So we’re splitting the update. We’re confident there’s more than enough new content in this first part for you to enjoy this completely new approach to making maps. Once more, I’d like to thank all of you for your patience, and I truly hope this first part of the Fun with Objects will exceed your expectations of what Dungeon Alchemist can be.

To demonstrate the flexibility of the new multilevel system, we have added a few screenshots to this announcement to showcase what you'll be able to do… soon!