Best practice for handling transition between rooms in a dungeon

Bernd

Hi, I am pretty new to Godot, and as an exercise, I started to rebuild the first dungeon of The Legend of Zelda, A link to the past. https://youtube.com/watch?v=21QJ-Xlk2vY&t=2s

My question is how you would handle the transition between the rooms.

There are several options: 1. The complete dungeon is a scene and load the entire dungeon as soon as you enter it and handle the transition only by camera movement 2. Every room is a dedicated scene and load only one room at once. During a transition animation, load the respective room

Which option would you choose, or do you have other options in mind?

fire7side

That's just a big tile map and they are following the character between rooms with the camera.

Erich_L

The way I'd think about it is, the smaller you can cut up the parts of the game, the more detail you'll be able to add to each scene. I'd definitely keep those parts of the levels as different scenes. If it's a linear game you could probably preload the next/previous level in the background.

Bernd

Thanks for your answer. I think I go for the first option because it is just a small pixel game and I just want to practice godot with that project.

fire7side

@Bernd said: Thanks for your answer. I think I go for the first option because it is just a small pixel game and I just want to practice godot with that project.

I think it's a good choice in terms of re-using rooms or parts of rooms and general level design because you get the big picture. Of course, anything you do is going to build experience. I've only did some minor work with the tile system myself because I focus on 3d. You can always keep the AI positions and just clone them when the player gets to the room depending on the size of the map if you want to run it on android or something, but they are very good with resources because they were limited back then and anything it runs on will be more than sufficient. They hold up especially on android or web games, but pc too. I think they got to be masters from their earlier game designs. In fact, I think the creators of Breath of Wild used their older games for inspiration, I remember reading something about it.

nene

I came here with pretty much the exact same question.

In my case I want the NPC-s to continue doing their stuff in various rooms while the player is not necessarily there. So the option of completely destroying the previous room and loading a brand new one is not really on my table.

Probably option #1 is also a good-enough approach for my small game, but I'm wondering what if my game world was too big and detailed for this approach to be performant enough? How would one solve this problem in a more optimal way?

It seems one would need to have some sort of separate system for processing activities that happen in hidden rooms. Might be achievable if these are only a few of these things that need to happen in hidden rooms. Looks pretty problematic though if one would want to do anything more complex e.g. involving physics.

nene

Just implemented the #1 solution and spent a few hours fighting with strange problems in my teleport-from-one-room-to-another code, until I finally discovering there's a bug in Godot with Area2D body_entered signal:

https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues/14578

In case somebody happens to struggle with the same thing...