Generating Dungeons

54 Days Until I Can Walk

I had planned on spending today laying the foundation for an essay on macros. Instead I was distracted by a presentation given by Herbert Wolverson on procedurally generated dungeons. Rather than fight this interest, I decided to roll with it and fell down a YouTube rabbit hole of procedurally generating dungeons. I don’t feel too guilty about this as my plan is to include some procedural generation in the Fourteen Screws engine soon. And after what was, frankly, a pretty intense week of trying to figure out some of the nuances of macros, it was nice to be able to do something light and fun.

Wolverson’s video below covers a vast array of dungeon generation algorithms, including one which I first heard described by Bob Nystrom (you should definitely check out his article, if only for the extremely satisfying animations).

However, while Wave Function Collapse (WFC) is briefly mentioned by Wolverson, it is not discussed. For that I turned to a presentation by Brian Bucklew, also linked below. This led me on down a path searching for crates that I might be able to use to generate some interesting environments for my engine. While none of this is “critical path” stuff, it’s definitely an area that I would like to explore during this project.

Finally I stumbled across a presentation by Tarn Adams who, let’s be fair, is one of the gods of procedural generation. Although he wasn’t talking about anything that I would use in Fourteen Screws, I’m always happy to hear him talk about his work. And so I fell down another rabbit hole.

All of these talks were give at the Roguelike Celebration conference, which I guess I’ll have to add to my “list of events I would like to attend”.

It has been a very pleasant day of learning about inspiring things that make me want to improve my engine.