Grim Dawn Development Update, Housing Configuration Imagery
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This system is intended to give us the ability to create diverse looking houses / house layouts with a minimal amount of unique 3d models required. Our higher-level goal though is to create cool gameplay spaces. Houses in Grim Dawn aren't just decorative or places you enter to talk to NPCs, they're a big part of the gameplay area as some regions of the game feature sprawling abandoned towns where you can literally fight room-to-room. ARPG urban combat?
The other upside to this is that it will be available to modders, giving them an incredible amount of flexibility to create cool levels in ways that we probably haven't even imagined. It is relatively easy to also open up the textures for these pieces and make even more variations.
Here is a peak at just a portion of the pieces for one building texture set and some sample configurations of various houses you can build with different texturing. Note that these are only the wood house walls, we also have other materials such as fieldstone and brick walls. We also have 2nd story pieces and staircases that I totally forgot to include!
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The houses themselves aren't destructible since you can go in them and they help to define the gameplay space. Part of the idea is to essentially create an above-ground layout similar to what you'd normally only see in dungeons, where the player is sometimes fighting in more confined spaces where it is trickier to avoid the enemy. I always liked the sort of room-to-room fighting that happened sometimes in the D2 undergrounds where you had to be careful about running into a room full of enemies where the exit might get cut off and you could be pinned against a wall.
That said, we do plan to sometimes have special breakable wall-pieces that are meant to be a sort of semi-secret way to open up alternate routes through the level. They'd probably be distinguished by some cracking in the wall plaster or whatever that, if you were looking for it, would signal that you could break through.
