About Procedural Level Generation vs Hand-Design

We are losing random terrain and building *shape* generation



We are not losing random building/enemy/item types



We are gaining really great enemy pathfinding so they'll be more challenging



We are gaining more time for me to make unique content

Hi everyone! I just wanted to let y'all know that I'm currently working on a pretty big change to how the levels in Black Ice are generated. Namely, I'm going to stop generating the levels procedurally, in favor of building the levels by hand.Why? One reason is that I think I can do it better this way. The only thing we're really losing is placement of buildings and terrain - I can still randomize building types (swarm/dark/miniboss) and therefore what enemies spawn, and of course what loot drops. With static building placement, I can do cool stuff like create buildings by hand, maybe placing catwalks between buildings, and more easily introduce new building types that might require certain types of terrain around them.I was already generating some new terrain by hand - if you've played the current Indev version, you've seen this. This terrain was going to have buildings randomly placed on it, but at least to me, each iteration of this didn't feel significantly different to me. With the new setup, I'll actually have more time to do unique terrain (and buildings) because I won't be wrestling with how to place them procedurally. And I can always copy the new stuff manually and place it in multiple places in the world.The other big reason I'm doing this is because it allows the enemy pathfinding to be *much* better. You know how enemies would sometimes fall off catwalks, or have trouble climbing up buildings? That's going to be a thing of the past. Check out my pathfinding testing - enemies know where to jump off, can reverse direction if you move, and know how to go around corners without falling off - proof in this gif . Moreover, enemies can climb much better, and it even rounds the corner nicely at the top Smarter enemies and more interesting terrain means you'll actually be able to use the terrain to your advantage - funnel them through the hot gates, where their numbers mean nothing! Or at least, up on the catwalk.In addition, one other change I think I need to make is that servers will *not* go intangible when you hack them. Instead, I'm thinking they'll go white or look cracked/broken somehow, to show that you've hacked them, but you'll still be able to climb on them and use them for cover when hacking other nearby servers. The loot will be placed outside where it's easy to get to. This will make it a lot easier on me, so that I can do stuff like stack servers on top of each other, and enemies will always know how to climb on servers, because they won't disappear.A big upside of all this is that people will actually be able to learn their way around, instead of feeling lost. If you still feel lost after this, please, feel free to ask questions. I really hope y'all agree with me that this is for the better.TL;DR: