Hedges of Hell (HEJ 2024 June jam)

Fond memories of playing Doom, Heretic and Hexen finally inspired us to make an old school FPS with Doom '16-style lock-in arena mechanics.

We started working on the project specifically for the HEJ 2024 June jam as the themes "blind" and "navigate" sounded like good fits for an older idea we had: making a top-down dungeon crawler action game where you can only see one room at a time, but you can traverse dungeon walls (doors are boring anyway) to go the the next one, with the possibility of encountering a very sticky situation that you can't possibly anticipate.

I also thought that this could be a good opportunity to finally utilize the amazing Polyomino Tiler by Gary Fredericks to generate interesting dungeon layouts using polyominos. I wrote a little JS snippet that exports the generated tile layout to a JSON string that I could import to Construct and started experimenting. After a while I figured that "static" pre-generated tiled polyomino levels were good, but unifying some of the polyomino shapes randomly every time was even better: this way the level actually changes every time the game is restarted, even though it's always the same polyomino "base map", and sometimes the random unification results in big arenas and/or long corridors, which is quite cool. On an unrelated note I also discovered that changing the field of view has a very cool zoom-like effect.

At one point we made the decision to turn the game into an FPS and use a hedge maze setting, Tibor started working on the environment and enemy assets and finally Hedges of Hell was born. After the jam's deadline we continued updating the game for a few more weeks, I streamed one of the sessions on my Twitch channel.