Post on cyclic dungeon generation

[Joris Dormans]

Hey guys,

As an effort to push the greenlight campaign for our upcoming roguelike, I wrote a brief post on Control500 on how cyclic dungeon generation is superior to branching path generation. I am guessing it of interest to this community as well...

http://ctrl500.com/tech/handcrafted-feel-dungeon-generation-unexplored-explores-cyclic-dungeon-generation/

Best,

Joris

[Ian Badcoe]

Hi Joris,

This is a really great post!  Not least because it overlaps a lot with ideas I've been puzzling over for a long time.

I've not been interest in cycles for their own sake, but I have been concerned with accommodating them as part of general graph-based layout generation...  See my posts over the last year or so in the group history for details if you are interested.

I particularly like the way you build semantic/narrative interpretations on top of the simple geometry e.g. ideas like having a long safe vs. a short dangerous route; long ways out that reveal shortcuts back; or traps, the reverse of that, where there's an easy way into a location, but the way back is much harder.

In terms of general graphs similar ideas can be attached to other constructs.  e.g. a locked door can be reachable at an early stage, but the key is down a branch where an obstacle must be traversed...  so that is putting similar semantic/narrative interpretation onto a simple T-junction (and the interpretation remains if the T-junction becomes a crossroads where the 4th direction is part of some unrelated construct -- as long as you do not accidentally short-cut something that is supposed to be hard.)

Was your figure 3 example 100% automatically generated?  It's not quite clear from the write-up, but as you have a functional game prototype I assume it must be the case?

Great work!

Ian

---

From: Joris Dormans <jo...@ludomotion.com>
To: procedur...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Tuesday, 5 July 2016, 15:02
Subject: [pcg] Post on cyclic dungeon generation

--

---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Procedural Content Generation" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to proceduralcont...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[Joris Dormans]

Hi Ian,

I agree, similar ideas can be applied to different constructions, and obviously the T-join is a good example. I just found those cycles are super effective, and it is trivial to cut a cycle up in such way that it becomes a T-join.

And yes, figure 3 is 100% generated. If you're interested there's couple of more examples to be found at our facebook page and steam page (https://www.facebook.com/UnexploredGame/ and http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=656180592)

Best,

Joris