Version 0.30, Randomized Layout & Hollow Meadow

Here comes version 0.30, woohoo!
Meaning, I'm guesstimating the game is 30% complete.

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WHAT'S NEW IN V.030
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- The Random Layout Logic - 
I never had time to implement this during the jam, but I wanted for Olympus Central to offer some rogue-lite elements and felt that providing randomized layouts would be a good way to start supporting this intention.

Currently, the system will always spawn the same 6 available rooms, but eventually they will be randomly selected along with connected characters and events to make each playthrough as different as possible, while still letting players retain all previously acquired knowledge about how to deal with the crisis and how to best interact with Olympian Gods present on site.

Here's a quick summary of how things work right now. 

The game core mechanic is about finding hidden objects in the environment, so each room needs to be crafted and staged in a way to create these hiding and staging opportunities. Therefore, these layouts are not procedurally generated. Instead each room is added to an array and the logic goes through the array trying to spawn each room, one by one, based on a spawn probability. If the probability is not enough, the room is skipped, and the logic proceeds to the next one while increasing the probability after each skip. 

If the probability is reached, the logic now tries to spawn the room and first picks at random one of the spawn locations, defined by the room physical connections and registered into a spawn location array after each room is spawned. Then, the logic checks if spawning the room would overlap with another room previously spawned, if so, the spawn is denied and the room tries to pick a different spawn location.
Once enough denies have been accumulated, the logic resets everything and starts over as I'm assuming that, at that point that, the current layout configuration could never be completed without any overlaps.

Finally when the room spawns its physical connections are registered as spawn location for other rooms and it's removed from the rooms array so that no room can spawn multiple times.

Once the logic has gone through all the rooms in the array, it checks how many rooms have been spawned and if that number equals the required total number of rooms to spawn. If not, the logic goes through the array once more and try spawning the missing room until the total number has been reached. Once that happens all gameplay actors are spawned, you'll hear some weird noises at that time, I need to reword how audio is implemented eventually.

I've done many tests with this logic and it seems to hold on. There seems to be a little position glitch with the latest room on one specific configuration, I'll have to look into that soon, but it should not break anything.

The biggest issue right now, is that given all the spawning trial and error going on, it can happen that sometimes the layout generation hasn't reached a satisfactory state by the time players have gone through the intro with Hera. If that happens to you, you'll notice you're unable to move until the layout has been completed. Keep an eye on the upper left corner for the ALL SPAWNED debug message that triggers once all the rooms have spawned.

- Hollow Meadow - 
Since it's been a while since the last update, I thought it was important the update also brought some new content, in the form of Hollow Meadow, the newest and biggest room in Olympus Central. It's been added to the random layout logic and can now spawn at any valid spawn position, in any order.

- Misc - 
* Rooms have been updated to better support random spawning and  connect with other rooms
* Texture tweaks for floor tiles in Zephyrus Library
* Added physics to suspended cages in Hades Chamber
* Added wall caps on all walls to hide texture seams
* Worked out half a solution to support navigation while spawning at random location
* Updated snake spawn from 12 to 20

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WHAT'S TAKING SO LONG
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This might seem like a long time coming, and it was to some extent, but all in all I've 'only' spent 75 days working on Olympus Central so far, including the jam development. I still spent the last months working on two projects, and since then have added a third one, Reign of the Imperaptors that was posted on itchio around the end of September.

Figuring out the logic for the layout randomization took me a while, I think it was a solid week, and another one to implement the spawning logic for all gameplay actors, and there have been surprises along the way too, as well as things I completely forgot to consider. By far, this is the most complex logic I've had to do in Unreal visual scripting so far, but everything seems to be working as intended now.

Then, I spent another week trying to understand why I was suddenly having silent crashes when opening Unreal, pretty much making any progress impossible. Turns out if came from the source control that didn't to like when I had checked in files before trying to open Unreal. As you can suspect this was quite alarming, but I'm pretty happy I eventually figured it out and was able to resume work on all my projects.
In the end, I currently don't have source control anymore, but I've got myself some courses to watch in order to better understand how to go around these issues.

The last week, which was incidentally last week, was dedicated to making Hollow Meadow.

So there you have it, that's pretty much the extent of everything that happened with Olympus Central since the last update, end of June. Things got crazy, a milestone was reached and the game is making progress. Not as fast as I'd like, but progress nonetheless.

I've been silently hoping to finish Olympus Central for the end of year, but that leaves only 10 weeks from now, assuming that I pause development on all other projects. So that doesn't really seem sustainable. Still, I'll work with that deadline in mind and we'll see how far we are from completion when the new year strikes.

Next on the list are the  controls that still need to be completely reworked, this is now my number one priority.
I still need to add that little bit of UI to indicate scrolling through dialogue options, as well as updated the logic around cursor detection as I've noticed some minor issues recently. After that it's probably going to be more content, more events, dialogues for the latest characters, and more rooms.

Feel free to download the version 0.30 and please let me know about any feedback and suggestions about the game, I always love to hear those. I'm also hoping you'll visit our little discord server where I post daily updates about whichever project I spent the day working on, full with gifs and screenshots.