Rooms and Mazes: A Procedural Dungeon Generator
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Rooms and Mazes: A Procedural Dungeon Generator
1–10 of 51 posts
Re: Rooms and Mazes: A Procedural Dungeon Generator
#2Looks good! I found this to be a great resource on Maze generation:
http://weblog.jamisbuck.org/2011/2/7/maze-generation-algorit...
Re: Rooms and Mazes: A Procedural Dungeon Generator
#3I think this article is a fantastic example of how you can blend prose with working interactive examples. The examples make you really trance out watching dungeons being carved out of nothing.
I think an often-discounted aspect of JavaScript's appeal is its ability to breathe life into a bunch of fascinating but otherwise dry concepts. Another terrific example is this page by the prolific Mike Bostock: http://bost.ocks.org/mike/algorithms/
Re: Rooms and Mazes: A Procedural Dungeon Generator
#4Labyrinth generator in a single line of code:
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/books/2012/11/compu...
Re: Rooms and Mazes: A Procedural Dungeon Generator
#5That was a very pleasant article and fills me with inspiration .. which is what I came here for, mostly, in the first place. I don't have many applications for twisty mazes in my space at the moment, but one thing that I always thought would be interesting is to use the dependency graphs/use-counts of various system libraries as inputs to a maze generator. Sort of like Fsn (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn) but with a lot more twisty, bendy mazes between the ldd details .. huh, yet another bit of bait for the bucket ..
Re: Rooms and Mazes: A Procedural Dungeon Generator
#6Another cheap and very effective technique for procedural level and maze generation is to create a "walker" or series of walkers that start at some point, walk in a direction and then turn at random intervals, leaving a path of corridors and occasionally rooms in their wake. This is how Vlambeer's Nuclear Throne generates its levels, and there's a good article from Jan Willem Nijman, it's developer, here: http://www.vlambeer.com/2013/04/02/random-level-generation-i...
If you'd like a more academic look into procedural 2d game generation, there's a nice research paper here, that describes a method and talks about Spelunky a lot (the king of procedural 2d level generation, in my book): http://games.soe.ucsc.edu/sites/default/files/cig10_043CP2_1...
Additionally, Derek Yu open sourced the code to the original Spelunky, and Darius Kazemi created a great breakdown of its level generation techniques here, also with interactive examples: http://tinysubversions.com/spelunkyGen/index.html
The action roguelike genre, particularly the roguelike FPS, is a vital new area being explored by indie game developers. It reminds me of the way 2D platformers were mined, explored, and iterated upon starting around 7 or 8 years ago.
Right now, it doesn't take much to stand out from the herd, as many of the most popular games in the genre don't do much beyond generating a bunch of square rooms and connecting them with doors and short, straight corridors. In my opinion, developers in the genre should take more cues from Doom, and less from original Zelda dungeons moving forward.
And, from a more holistic perspective, nobody really cares about mazes, room placement on a grid, and connective corridors when playing a game, beyond a brute mechanical level. A more useful framework for thinking of generating levels might be to go one level of abstraction higher. Think about a level as a story for your player, and generate setpieces or 'acts' that you want the player to experience as they play. Keep in mind the basics of a good story: an escalation in tension and difficulty, spaced with breathers for rhythm and flow. Place those sets on a path in a map, then figure out a way to connect them together at the lower level with rooms, objects, enemies, and corridors.
Re: Rooms and Mazes: A Procedural Dungeon Generator
#7Another cheap and very effective technique for procedural level and maze generation is to create a "walker" or series of walkers that start at some point, walk in a direction and then turn at random intervals, leaving a path of corridors and occasionally rooms in their wake. This is how Vlambeer's Nuclear Throne generates its levels, and there's a good article from Jan Willem Nijman, it's developer, here: http://www.…
Adom is a roguelike that does your "holistic perspective" very well - it mixes an overall story arc and set piece locations with a lot of randomised elements. It's going through a bit of a renaissance after raising 90k on IndieGoGo.
Re: Rooms and Mazes: A Procedural Dungeon Generator
#8The best series of maze generation that I know is in Cogmind's dev blog:
http://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/2014/06/procedural-map-gen...
Re: Rooms and Mazes: A Procedural Dungeon Generator
#9Pretty neat is also Laurent Victorino's maze generator that can generate mazes with patterns:
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/LaurentVictorino/20141202/231...
Re: Rooms and Mazes: A Procedural Dungeon Generator
#10It is an amazing article. The "fluff" prose is well written and the visualizations are awesome. Kudos.
An honest question, though, is maze generation generally useful? Other than for generating mazes and dungeons, obviously, not that isn't a worthy goal in and of it self.