Lenna’s Inception
After a long development cycle, Lenna’s Inception has finally been released!
One of my earliest posts on this blog was about an early, in-development
version of the game, so I’ve had my eye on it for a while.
The basic concept is that it’s a Legend of Zelda style exploration game, but the entire progression is procedurally generated. You won’t know what the map looks like, what the dungeons are, or even where the nearby shop is until you explore the map yourself.
There’s a toggle in the options menu that lets you watch the generator at work, which of course is one of my favorite features.
There’s an obvious comparison with speedrunning randomizers, but with a game that was built from the ground up to be generative. Which means that it can do a bunch of tricks that require full control over the game design, like the rather elaborate map generation that carefully gates your access based on what items you have acquired. It’s not chaotically random, either: the second half of the map is gated by one of your quests, so even though the map is different every playthrough, there’s a logical structure behind the generation.