Map Generation experiments
I’m gonna write some more about my map generation algorithm, as it’s pretty much the only thing I can show off right now without revealing some EXTREME programmer art.
I’ve made a couple roguelikes in the past, however usually when it comes to map design I take the approach of ramming rectangular rooms and corridors together. Usually these end up looking pretty good, at least if you’ve seen my maps for Bones, however this time around I want to have more of a focus on the terrain, so more complicated rooms are necessary.
So instead of having seperate defined corridors and rooms, I’ve just lumped all of them under an overall ‘room‘ structure. The generator then generates rooms and rams them together however they can fit.
Right now I have the following different room types:
And a small map generated using these looks something like this:
As you can see, some of the rooms are quite complex and impressively constructed, the dungeon structure overall is still very random.
There is however one problem that I have encountered so far. Since I am only attaching rooms to one other room by snapping them onto available entrances, this is generating a tree structure in which each room has one ‘parent‘ room that it connected to when it was generated, and then many ‘child‘ rooms that were generated connecting to it. Take the following dungeon for instance.
The plain dungeon, on the left, doesn’t look too bad, however when the connections between each room are overlayed as on the right, you can really see the tree structure. Appart from the random connections that I added in to try and fix this(marked in blue), the whole thing is comprised of branching areas that seperate down their own paths without ever rejoining.
I’m not sure yet whether this is a bad thing, though I’m afraid it’ll create extremely backtracky gameplay as you travel down one path, then all the way back to the start to travel down another. It’ll be cool to see in playtesting whether this actually turns out to be the case. I might even end up adding portals at the end of each branch to move you to the end of others.
In case you’re wondering, here’s a picture of what it looks like from the players perspective with fog of war.
In other news, I released an update for Midnight this week, fixing some issues that made the game ball bustingly frustrating. Should be better now :)
