Hollow Knight is a popular metroidvania game that features a vast and interconnected world full of secrets and challenges. Some players enjoy adding more variety and difficulty to their exploration by using mods that randomize the items and locations in the game, a popular concept among many similar games. One such mod is the Randomizer 4, which allows players to choose different options for randomizing items, charms, skills, enemies, bosses, and even room transitions. However, one of the most challenging modes of this mod is the “room rando”, which randomizes every door and transition in the game. This mode can create complex and non-intuitive paths that do not follow traditional Euclidean geometry. Instead, they follow more a Riemannian geometry, which is a branch of differential geometry that studies curved spaces where angles and distances vary from point to point. In this article, I will present a piece of software I made that helps map out the game when using the room rando mode. This software can help players keep track of their progress, find new areas, and avoid getting lost or stuck in loops.
Since the last game jam, I realised how long it took for me to make something so simple. I thought to myself, wouldn’t it be nice if I made my own engine, so I can create my own shortcuts, and create a system that works with my workflow? Well, that’s exactly what I have begun doing, and it’s slowly taking great shape. At the moment, this is a completely personal project and is not a state to be open source yet.
At the beginning of 2020, before the event that shall not be named, I started to work on using Discord’s API to create a bot in some servers I had. My initial goal was to make some sort of AI that would chime into conversations, and be able to respond in a way that was relevant to the conversation. My frist thought was to implement some sort of text based neural network trained on some select server chat logs. And so began the journey to create the first (as far as I know) Discord neural network chatbot.