Antoine · Level Designer

I thought about expanding this into a connector about the same size as the one we have over there. And then I realized that basically we have the shaft over here, the elevator shaft, which is a problem. So in this case, for example, if I make it too big, we would have bounding box checks that would ensure that nothing would collide with one or the other, stuff like that. So maybe that new section that I have here could work over here, but maybe it wouldn't work where I'm building it right now.

Manuel · Level Designer

That's why I mentioned that sometimes it helps if you just have a longer corridor that brings out the whole space a bit further and then allows for more generation options, because otherwise the procedural tool would tell you, hey, it would collide, so it wouldn't generate. And then it tries different combinations or different slots where it could connect this new piece to.

Andreas Johansson · Lead Level Designer, Persistent Universe

One of the design philosophies that I've been pushing for as well is that we really want to get away from this room, corridor, room, corridor kind of approach to building. That's not really what the world looks like. It's a series of rooms. It's a bit more structured than that, so you will never get that. But at some points in the game, you might use corridors, to what these guys have been saying, to push some content a bit further away. Because otherwise, we will run into bounding box issues with all the items that lie around it, and things will just never be able to generate. But with the procedural tool as well, we have the ability to procedurally construct corridors. So the game, when generating, can build corridors by itself.

Manuel · Level Designer

What I wanted to say is not necessarily dependent on the procedural stuff, but what Antoine was building before: we sometimes already plan for future spaces where things could connect later on. For the initial release, it would just be cut off; there would be a locked door, and you couldn't go any further. But we already try to plan ahead a bit for how we can expand the space in the future. We already know from the level design documents what we want to build in the Tier 1, Tier 2 stuff, and we already plan out these spaces. Let's say, Area 18, the hospital: we already know where it would go, and place a facade there and something like that. So we already plan for this space and leave that for the future.