Ramen VR Talks Co-op Zenith: Infinite Realms: Procedural Generation, Lessons Learned and Improvements

mmorpg.com:

With the next chapter of Zenith: The Last City and upcoming free to play co-op Zenith: Infinite Realms, approaching, the Ramen VR team is taking us behind the scenes and talking about their goals in approaching this next step in the Zenith universe.

In the new devblog, they list several key design pillars: “Always Something New and Time to Fun = 0;”. Working with those design pillars, the team explains what always something new means in relation to their new game mode. In this case, their procedural generation system they created, and are using in Zenith: Infinite Realms to bring together more content, faster, but still keeping the human involvement and refinement. 

This change, in part, seemed to stem from all the time and needed effort to build out Zenith: The Last City. “As a past example, the Skyland zone in The Last City was entirely handcrafted. Every mob spawner, point of interest, and piece of geometry were placed one by one. Building content for The Last City was an uber manual process we learned a lot from,” the blog reads. Those lessons taught them to innovate.

Now, their new system, which the blog shows some examples from, they can create, tweak, or even reroll a level in a few clicks. This speeds up the development time and let the developers make their ideas reality on a larger scale at a faster pace. Now that they are creating a free to play game mode that will rely on consistent content, this makes sense.

They’re also introducing seamless instancing this time around. Since the new mode is session based and co-op, when you join a session, they're making it so it's instantaneous, and the same when you return to the city. they're eliminating loading screens with their new system.

Given that Ramen VR is counting on this new system and onInfinite Realms to helpsolidify the future of Zenith, it’s a big effort, but also seems much more simplified too. The plaza will have an open air design for the new lobby and with challenges and different session types,