Frozen Flame: Procedural World Generation in UE4

About game

“The planet was frozen after the war between titans and dragons. When dragons were gone, a blue flame – ether was extracted from the planet’s heart and gave rise to hordes of monsters. At the same time last titans created first humans. They shall unite to survive, use flame to become powerful and find the last dragon to reestablish the balance.”

Frozen Flame is a new Multiplayer Survival RPG from Russian indie developers Magisterion. It is based on Unreal Engine 4 and will be available in 2018 for PC (and consoles later).

Publisher is not determined yet. Developers shared an exclusive information about their plans to build an infinite game world with balanced PVE/PVP servers.

Randomly generated lands

We are using Dungeon Architect to generate locations on the first server start. It’s a really good solution, but it’s requiring some optimization to make it work in the big open world. In our case we just put different lands (and biomes) on the infinite ice plain, so players can walk or fly between them. Also it’s required to use scattering to trace good locations for some objects and items.

Infinite dedicated servers on one world map

Usually, in survival games you spend time to find a good dedicated server. But in Frozen Flame, you just click “Play” and then automatically go to the fresh and available server. As a player you can open a world map and see your server as a zone (with coordinates) on the big world map. If we’ll have too many players – new servers will be added automatically too.

United PVE and PVP zones

Usually PvE servers are just too boring. At the same time it’s really hard to play on PVP servers of Rust or ARK, for example. If you haven’t played for a day your house will usually be destroyed. So we are trying to create a dangerous world, where you will not be afraid to lose everything, but will always need to protect your territory.

Each server will conditionally have 3 zones:

• Middle lands (PVE/PVP zones) – players can build their camps and fight with monsters together. They can’t kill other players,but they can try to steal something from others’ houses (break open a door or a chest). At the same time player can set traps (like spiked floor or mimic chest) to protect their houses from thefts.
• Lower lands (PVE zones) – usually they consist of dark caves or dungeons. Player should fight together against monsters to survive.
• Floating islands (PVP zones) – to fly there players must earn a flying mount first (giant flying bird by default). There they will find rare resources to build castles. But there are no limits on killing others. Also those lands will never be damaged during the night, so it might be a good way to save resources for guilds.

Server time periods

Each server will have it’s own difficulty level. Players have some time before the night (1-3 months) to find and kill the boss in a randomly spawned dungeon. Night will continue for 3-7 real days. That is a hard time for survival. But if players have killed the boss before the last night something positive will happen (like new green unfrozen forests spawn). If not, some lands can be damaged during the night.

Also if players have killed the boss server difficulty level will grow. Monsters will become much more powerful and another boss will be added. That can be almost endless.

Teleports between servers

If you don’t like your server for some reason or just want to go to your friends’ server – you can find and use the teleport. Your hero progress will be saved, but all resources will be lost. Each time it will cost more and more flame, so it’s not possible to move between servers too often. But anyway – players have a freedom to move whenever they want.

Movement freedom

Players can glide in the air, climb the walls or even fly on giant birds (after time). So there are many ways to find something interesting (like rare resources in caves). As developers we are playing the game for thousands of times, but each time it gives us a new experience.

Building system

Players can build their houses and fortress anywhere (like walls bottom, giant tree branches, dark caves, dead dragon’s bones etc). They can build bridges, towers, fences and other big constructions to change the look of the world. Also there are different monuments as a part of the game’s story.

Game stylization

The game stylization is really helpful for general optimization. But the hardest thing here is to find a balance between the darkness (it should be dangerous) and peace (it should be attractive at the same time). That’s why lighting and colors will be changing very often. For now we are still not satisfied by the result.

Roadmap

We really hope that players would like it. The main target here is to make an interesting and infinite world. There are lots of other interesting features. If you’d like to see it in action – feel free to sign up for game alpha test this year at http://frozen-flame.com.