[This is a Development Diary post. Everything in here is subject to change! Don't hate us! <3]
You may have noticed that there are two spots in the Overworld where soldiers keep you from going further. And you may have thought to yourself: If only that wasn't so, and the Overworld was bigger! It would feel so much more like a large RPG Overworld then!
And you may have noticed a peculiar fellow, talking about something to happen sometime in the future, with exploring large worlds.
Well, today, we want to give you a sneak peek of what we are planning.
Dungeon Deities greatest strengths are its player created dungeons. This is a focus we've always had, and this is not changing. However, we feel that the concept of the Overworld allowed us to not only flesh out the world much more, giving Violet Land more context and texture, but gameplay-wise, it provided a valuable breathing space, contextualizing the dungeon exploration better, and, finally, providing a bit of a stark contrast to the dark and dangerous dungeon exploration. Additionally, the ability to gather information about a journey on the Overworld makes especially long dungeons much fairer, as you are able to prepare.
However, the Overworld was much to small to fulfill these goals, and soon enough, you had seen everything (expect maybe for that secret).
So most of you stuck to playing "Normal" or "Heroic" journeys, to get into the action much quicker.
We plan on soon opening the world to the east, allowing you to enter the "Wilderness".
The wilderness is a new, large, procedurally generated map, that will change regulary, and that will host a number of Dungeons. How many dungeons, and how it'll look are parameters we will be constantly tweaking based on your feedback. For the moment, know that while it is generated procedurally, every player will see the same general layout, though the different teams may find different ways through them.

The overworld is generated with a focus on playability first. The generated "geometry" (where mountains, planes, beaches, etc. are) is subdivided into small areas (you can barely make out their outlines in the screenshot above). Then, we determine which of these areas are connected, and placing barries between areas that are not connected. While we do this, we also keep track of the difficulty the enemies in that region should have. In this way, you'll encounter easy enemies at first, but as you proceed to the harder difficulties, the enemies become more and more difficult (this is implied by the color of the dots). Periodically, we also decide where to place dungeons.
These areas are then filled with enemies, trees, grass, and various other decoration items. All trying to make the world look nicer! Below, you can see a shot of a quick debug screen. Ingame, it will look much like the normal overworld does!

You may also encounter strange, magical barriers that will only vanish if you beat their corresponding dungeon.
We'll give you more details soon! For the moment, we hope you enjoyed this sneak peek!