Howdy brave  KILLSPIRACY  theorist I wanted to share the progress being made on the next update and some design decisions due to that.

First up is the fact that the next update will have a new method of generating random levels. The new levels will be assembled from human-designed level chunks that join together in various ways like a four-way intersection, straightaway, or T junction. Each chunk is the same size and selected from a pool of pre-authored layouts based on the theme of the current level. To do this I needed a design tool to author the chunks quickly as possible so I'd like to show you the level block editor. 

It's a tile-based editor that allows me to save the tiles as a string of characters and then reconstruct them at run time. It's admittedly very simple but there are a few cool things about it being this way, Mainly it was only about a days worth of work. 

Second It's something I could eventually ( no promises ) release publicly, Provided that  I code a way for the tile codes to be read from an external file.

So why'd I do this?  Because I'm not a robot and neither are you LOL.

Here's an example of the string of characters that the tile editor generates for the above pictures level chunk 

00000011110000000000001mc1111100000000111100010000000020003631000t0m0020031t17000d0d002031117000111110231m1700001m1110241170c111111m1116416011111111104104m601100d0d000100411t100m0c000100011110000000111100m1000000001c1111110000000011m10000000000001111000000

Like I said simple but hard to make sense of if you're trying to design something.  The zero is nothing, ones are playable aria,  "m" is a monster spawn point etc. 

You could try and format it like this, ( I believe this is how the creator of spunky did it in the free version ).

0000001111000000
0000001mc1111100
0000001111000100
0000002000363100
0t0m0020031t1700
0d0d002031117000
111110231m170000
1m1110241170c111
111m111641601111
1111104104m60110
0d0d000100411t100
m0c0001000111100
00000111100m1000
000001c1111110000
000011m100000000
00001111000000000

But again, I'm just a dumb meat monkey, I can't slap the keyboard well enough to do this the hundreds of times I'd need to in order to make all the juicy level chunks you people deserve hence the tool. That's kind of the moral of the story today: Make your own editors and Preview tools! It saves time and your sanity.

Diagonal walls are so last week ...

No, really that's most of what I did last week. yep ...  Diagonal walls.

As you can see in the tile editor and this screenshot walls can be placed on a 45 degree diagonal. This is going to allow for more interesting layouts and more natural-looking room shapes in certain levels like the catacombs. One difficulty that arose from this I that the player movement code that was in the game didn't get along with these new diagonal beauties and I was forced to rewrite all the movement code to handle them. It set feels the same but now nobody is going to get stuck to walls.

Other quick things to note.

I'm changing the way spawn points work. Currently, every monster, cultist, and chest share the same generic pool of spawn points as you can see in the level editor above they will now have their own exclusive spawn points.

I'm also currently planning on leaving the original method of level generation in the game as an option that you can turn on in the planned options menu on the off chance someone actually misses it.