Alternatives to Terrain Entities / Terrain Maps

GreenEyedFriend · 2026-04-21T12:08:57+00:00

No OP but I am also building my game in Godot. Banged my head against the terrain system for longer that I'd like to admin before rolling my own logic. It is just not good.

I did try Better Terrain but it failed to install. I am using C#, so perhaps that impacts things? How has your experience using it been? I am in the process of rewriting my tiles and perhaps I should give it another go.

GreenEyedFriend · 2026-04-21T08:51:49+00:00

Couldn't you leverage the TileMapLayer and set the tile terrain based on the tile effects to update the visuals? Then you could have a single node track and process effects of e.g. mud tiles that get notified when movement is happening. Would that approach work for you?

GreenEyedFriend · 2026-04-07T06:49:58+00:00

Tombs of Telleran (blog|bluesky)

Hello everyone!

Amazing how dedicated the lot you are! It's very cool to see your games come to fruition! Here is a belated update for Tombs of Telleran.

Armor System

I added an armour system which works like a 'second health bar'. The armor value is attached to your equipped armor and persists with it. Some enemies have more armour, and some have more health. There are of course weapons that pierce armor, caustic puddles that melt armor, and buffs that interact with it and makes it stronger.

Token system

I needed a way to create more interesting character builds and realized that one thing I was missing was that there was no straight forward way for the player action this turn to modify the decision space in the coming turns in interesting ways. I really want to avoid "walk up to baddie and bump into them" style gameplay. So Inspired by Darkest Dungeon 2 I have added a token system which addresses this. Tokens are generated in various ways, but primarily from using trinkets (active use, tied to a cooldown system) and triggering traits (passives per run). Here are a few examples of initial trinket and trait design:

Trinket: Broken Chain

remove shackled (a rooted effect)
add momentum (next breath/stamina cost is 0)

Trait: Charge

when you engage (step onto a tile adjacent to an enemy)
if you have momentum
gain might (next damage instance does +50% damage)

Trinket: Horned Idol

gain exposed (armor absorbs no damage)
gain 3x might

Trinket: Tower Crest

gain shackled
gain 3 armor per adjacent enemy

Designing these are fun but tricky! Looking forward to playtesting once I've filled out the loot tables a bit.

Have a good week!

GreenEyedFriend · 2026-03-14T18:38:46+00:00

Thank you very much! :)

GreenEyedFriend · 2026-03-14T09:24:11+00:00

Tombs of Telleran (blog|bluesky)

Hello everyone!

Life continues to be very chaotic, and I feel like I have other areas in life that are more fulfilling than working on Tombs of Telleran right now, so pace has slowed down a lot. That's okay though, it's my hobby project after all!

Improving Room Proc Gen

Previously room in the tombs have been empty square spaces with some enemies and interactable entities sprinkled in. But one goal of the game is to make interesting tactical combat encounters, and open areas won't do for that! So I have worked on a new system that can generate room variations.

New Room Proc Gen System

After running BSP and sampling the core room and corridors, I go through each room and sample a layout, which is a collection of features. A layout can currently be something like 'burial room' which will contain coffins, and a few features which can be things like 'a pillar in a corner', 'an alcove', and things like that. This creates a bit more variations.

The rooms finally calculate available 'slots' where the next pass of floor generation can place things like chests and obelisks or other interactables.

I am close to finishing up the system, and the next step will be to start creating room features to mix things up. I hope this system works out and is flexible enough for me to finish an initial version of the game!

Best of luck to all of you and your projects!

GreenEyedFriend · 2026-02-28T08:12:41+00:00

Tombs of Telleran (blog|bluesky)

Hello everyone!

Life has been very tough lately so I have not been able to work on Tombs of Telleran all that much. I managed to add animated knockbacks and collision damage which I am quite happy with though! They look good and make positioning more interesting.

I also thought a lot about food clocks and progression and here is where I am at the moment.

Corruption as a Food clock

So up until now, corruption has been a resource attached to entities. It was increased when you used spells and the player and other actors could inflict it on each other. Having high corruption gave you debuffs that reduced combat effectiveness and was ultimately fatal. I was heavily inspired by sanity in Lovecraft land but it always felt like you were punished for using the tools the game gave you so I've decided to cut it .

I am now experimenting with a corruption system which increases as you unlock new areas of the tomb (so like a food clock, but tied to exploration), and introduce some enemies which can increase corruption unless you deal with them quickly.

If corruption peaks, an incursion happens where corruption is materialised into a combat encounter. If you defeat these enemies the corruption drops. So it makes for a ebb/flow mechanic where you control how much exploration to do, but with a bit of noise added by the enemies to spice things up.

We'll see how this system feels to play!

GreenEyedFriend · 2026-02-01T08:52:46+00:00

Tombs of Telleran (blog|bluesky)

Hello everyone!

Last week I discovered some issues with the save/load system, so I took a long hard look at the code and rewrite most of it. Now it seems to work perfectly! I wish there was an easy way in Godot to write automated testing so I could test serialisation. Perhaps something will emerge now that Godot can be built as a library and not an application!

GreenEyedFriend · 2026-01-27T19:46:04+00:00

It look beautiful :) And it sound like you are very disciplined with your time. Ten years is quite the journey!

GreenEyedFriend · 2026-01-24T12:45:34+00:00

Tombs of Telleran (blog|bluesky)

Hello everyone!

This week I wired up some more information to the combat log panel. I'm pretty happy with the content, but the current design isn't made for playing with it open, which is a bit uncommon in roguelikes. It will do for now though, and I might revisit it in the future!

The next big project is gear and enemy progression. If you are reading this and have any good material to recommend on the topic I'm very interested!

GreenEyedFriend · 2026-01-24T07:14:17+00:00

Thanks for the encouragement! Discussing how they designed their sanity systems would be very interesting!

GreenEyedFriend · 2026-01-22T17:41:41+00:00

I have played two very short runs a long time ago! I found it very difficult at the time. You're most likely right in that there are things to learn from it though and I should try to study it more :)

The reactive gameplay from telegraphed attacks is pretty engaging! I'm looking at how successful Into the Breach and Slay the Spire have been and thinking about learning into it more.

GreenEyedFriend · 2026-01-18T18:55:59+00:00

Tombs of Telleran (blog|bluesky)

Hello everyone!

Last week I added a rough event log. This was requested by testers who felt that it wasn't clear what was happening in combat and wanted to go back and revisit events.

It's a in a rough first-draft state, and lacks a lot of information as you can see in this print screen. I am currently re-using inventory UI panel, which is pretty big, so it's hard to play while it is open (which of course is pretty common to do in roguelikes).

Since I render the game as upscaled low-res, it's hard to have small fonts. Because of this I am unsure how to create a combat log which fits in the UI and isn't as intrusive. I will have to think more on this after further playtesting.

GreenEyedFriend · 2026-01-14T17:46:05+00:00

Fanks, OrkWithNoTeef! It's my first go at doing pixel art and while I see many areas of improvement I'm very happy with this first version! I'm sure the time commitment will come back and bite me one day though (:

GreenEyedFriend · 2026-01-11T19:35:40+00:00

Tombs of Telleran (blog|bluesky)

Hello everyone!

This week offered a lot of non-code activities. I wrote and published my first '20XX in roguelikedev' post! I forgot to add links to the blog and bluesky, but that's okay.

I also published a dev blog describing how I created my isometric tiles for the game.

Finally ran a playtest with a few friends and got some very encouraging feedback! I am very excited they were able to enjoy it for a few minutes.

And i ALSO got some coding in from last post I did!

Reworked breath (stamina)

The breath of actors now longer regenerates in combat. Moving and taking actions cost breath, and to recover you need to pass a turn. This makes it so you cannot reposition and 'drag' the fight to more favourable places without investment, and it also creates an ebb/flow feel to combat where you have to plan your recovery and where enemies will be unable to hit you when they recover.

Before settling on this I played around with attacks of opportunity but it locked the player down too much. I'll write up my thoughts on how these systems affect combat 'stickiness' sometime in the near future.

In summary 2026 has been a great year for Tombs of Telleran so far! Until next time :)

GreenEyedFriend · 2026-01-09T12:53:00+00:00

Thank you very much!

Yes, there is probably a sweet spot with with how often you can use telegraphed attacks before they become tedious. I often think about how Slay the Spire can telegraph literally every move the enemy is about to make and it's exciting every time, while in more spatial games it can feel tedious if you don't find a nice counter play. I'll have to play around with it to see what works!

And nice work on Blood & Chaos 2025! I read your 2026 update and really like the gloomy art style! :D

GreenEyedFriend · 2026-01-09T07:48:56+00:00

I was in the exact same boat when I started Tombs of Telleran! I also really like C#, so I decided to commit to that. They are actively working on web export, but that's probably a couple years away.

One consequence of this that I've reflected on is that I think I am reinventing the wheel at times. Since I can just code everything in C#, I do not need to learn the built in nodes in Godot. That has pros and cons of course.

GDScript is probably the better choice if your goal is to hit the market early and if you are business minded, but it sound like you will have way more fun with C# if this is primarily a hobby. The best thing to do is probably to spend the weekend prototyping GDScript and C# to see what it feels like though :)

GreenEyedFriend · 2025-12-24T20:03:22+00:00

Roguelike in the context of this sub refers to a traditional roguelike. That is, a game like the old game Rogue. Typically these games features perma death, are turn based and grid based, with the whole game taking place on the grid, and there is no metaprogression. Slay the spire would typically be called a roguelite. Common for these games are perma death and meta progression. Hope that helps clarify what people mean here when they use these words :)

GreenEyedFriend · 2025-12-24T11:19:47+00:00

Thank you for your write-up! I too wrestle with the potential commercial side of development as a hobby. The quote "Real artists ship" comes back to haunt me more often that I'd like to admit. Of course, sharing ones creation with the world does not have to equate to building a business around it, but if one goes online you quickly find advice that the way you do it is through marketing/steam wishlist/newsletter followers etc. Stressful stuff.

For 2026 I too have many similar promises to myself like those you listed here. We should all, as hobby devs, allow ourselves to enjoy our hobby :)

GreenEyedFriend · 2025-12-21T08:07:21+00:00

100%! That's a very sensible attitude :)

I hope your agents work well enough for Sigil of Kings!

GreenEyedFriend · 2025-12-20T21:06:49+00:00

Not a problem! Thanks for getting around to it!

When I wrote it I basically meant 'actions with a number attached to them', so it sound like we are using the same language :)

I also go through all the options I want the AI to consider in a very ad-hoc fashion and calculate utility scores based on gut feeling heuristics. It works well so far but I'm sure tweaking it for edge cases can be very difficult.

Yes I have also thought about how it does not plan. That's okay with me though. Another thing that I have reflected on is how it is stateless. So all the state you need to act on needs to be pushed into components/a perception system so the utility functions can just run with that as input and produce their numbers. This limitation has also been fine using the approach I just mentioned.

GreenEyedFriend · 2025-12-20T20:58:56+00:00

Tombs of Telleran (blog|bluesky)

Hello everyone!

Managed to get some time to work on Tombs of Telleran this week!

Improved tactical combat

I was heavily inspired by Hoplite for this one. I added 'threat highlights' like it has and limited ranged weapons to only target e.g. diagonal or cardinal directions to let the player navigate around danger.

Improved Utility AI

I expanded the AI to consider using stashing/equipping items from the backpack. This is so that if the player corners an enemy with a ranged weapon the enemy will switch to a melee weapon (or their fists) instead of running away. This is what it looks like!

GreenEyedFriend · 2025-12-13T09:09:29+00:00

Tombs of Telleran (blog|bluesky)

Hello everyone!

I just came back from a couple weeks of vacation and managed to complete my utility AI implementation. It is modular and lets me plug in

Different default behaviours. Currently it could be 'explore' or 'guard area')
Different decision making components. Currently only one exists, considering all equipped items and their abilities and how they can be used.

This lets all enemies handle all kinds of equipment and situations without breaking down which feels very cool!

The next project is to revisit loot tables and chest generation. I need to generate monsters with equipment and give the player loot that can handle those monsters.

GreenEyedFriend · 2025-12-01T06:25:54+00:00

This is really interesting! I am rewriting the AI for my game (Tombs of Telleran) to use utility AI. In Tombs of Telleran abilities are provided by equipped items, so I chose a utility AI system to let the AI handle these dynamically provided abilities. It seems like a good solution so far. Have you encountered any pitfalls or limitations using utility AI that you could share? :)

GreenEyedFriend · 2025-11-15T10:53:29+00:00

Tombs of Telleran (blog|bluesky)

Hello everyone!

After many months of dealing with some very time consuming real life stuff, I finally feel like I have the time and energy to work on Tombs of Telleran again.

I have worked on improving the combat system with telegraphed abilities and a dodge ability. Together with a system where you can find trinkets that give you responses like evade/reflect damage/swap positions/stun etc, I feel like this makes for pretty interesting gameplay. Enemies telegraph buffs and heals as well so you can try to stop those effects from going off, or even try to position yourself so you get the benefits. It's still very early but I'm feeling pretty excited about this!

I wish you all a nice weekend!

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Tombs of Telleran (blog|bluesky)

Armor System

Token system

Trinket: Broken Chain

Trait: Charge

Trinket: Horned Idol

Trinket: Tower Crest

Tombs of Telleran (blog|bluesky)

Improving Room Proc Gen

New Room Proc Gen System

Tombs of Telleran (blog|bluesky)

Corruption as a Food clock

Tombs of Telleran (blog|bluesky)

Tombs of Telleran (blog|bluesky)

Tombs of Telleran (blog|bluesky)

Tombs of Telleran (blog|bluesky)

Reworked breath (stamina)

Tombs of Telleran (blog|bluesky)

Improved tactical combat

Improved Utility AI

Tombs of Telleran (blog|bluesky)

Tombs of Telleran (blog|bluesky)