about

the blue fire rando is a game mode for blue fire that enhances replayability by shuffling pickups randomly while ensuring the game is still beatable without glitches

concept

the idea for the blue fire rando came from the hollow knight randomiser which i thought was really cool so i thought even though blue fire is not a fully fledged metroidvania it would add more replayability for one of my favourite games

devlog

it all started with a conversation with my friend Luukie13. a randomiser just like the one for hollow knight. a program that shuffles the locations of items, spirits, emotes, weapons and tunics. of course if this was unity this would be simpler however blue fire was made in unreal.

i remember delaying the inevitable implementation for so long by just messing around in winforms but eventually i psyched myself up enough to start trying

at first i approached the idea of changing enums and datatables - that didn't get me anywhere as it could only mix within types. i encountered the same problem plus default values not appearing when experimenting with references in maps and pretty much gave up

however then i start working on stove and discovered something that delighted me - i could change default property values by just adding them to the actor. this meant so much as it knocked out two birds with one stone - it meant that chests could mix and that chests with sapphire ore could be changed. but this didn't affect cutscenes and npcs which really sucked. i did manage to change shops which were located in the savegame blueprint so i could edit them there (actually nilo still doesn't work :p). however the npcs and cutscenes were still yet to be figured out.

i was quite concerned about making the logic for the randomiser and turned to the hollow knight implementation, randocore. i had a nice chat with homothetyhk who created the library and eventually came to the conclusion i should just implement it myself.

to randomise npcs and cutscenes, naturally i discovered a new modding technique - function library hooking.

create a dummy of the function library with all the correct function names, inputs and outputs and then duplicate that
name that duplicate to whatever you want and for each function in it call the original function that is in your dummy (i'd back this duplicate up)
then you can change the function to do whatever you want
cook the project and you'll have your hook and your dummy
delete the dummy
change any name reference to the function library in the target actor to your hook
since you didn't include the dummy the game will call the actual functions provided the function target is the dummy along with your stuff

and finally full randomisation was possible after transplanting was put into stove

after the gargantuan task of documenting checks was finished it was done. after that i managed to optimise writing to be so much faster from 5 minutes to 5 seconds

once the pseudoregalia rando was finished i updated the blue fire rando with the logic improvements (shuffling within each area and freezing progression items made progression appearing early very likely).