Game Development

On Dungeon Generation

As a gamer, game master and former (minor) game developer I am always interested in ideas and concepts that make a game out of an activity. In this case, I stumbled upon a blog about game programming patterns. This particular blog post is all about the random generation of dungeons. It is really an interesting read and you can retracte the several steps as the author, Bob Nystrom, made a simulation for every necessary step. Really nice!

One of my earliest memories of computing is a maze generator running on my family’s Apple IIe. It filled the screen with a grid of green squares, then incrementally cut holes in the walls. Eventually, every square of the grid was connected and the screen was filled with a complete, perfect maze.

My little home computer could create something that had deep structure—every square of the maze could be reached from any other—and yet it seemed to be chaotic—it carved at random and every maze was different. This was enough to blow my ten-year-old mind. It still kind of does today.

Stuff with Stuff: Rooms and Mazes: A Procedural Dungeon Generator