Random Dungeon Generation

Introduction

Hello! I am Erick Latshaw and I am the Technical Director for Precipice Games' Whispering Abyss. This post should serve as an introduction to our project following the pre-production phases. Whispering Abyss is a projectile-based third-person dungeon rogue-lite.  In game development, things are very likely to change along the way and work might get scrapped. Luckily, this does not happen as often to engineers as it does for artists or designers. Considering this, we wanted our first tasks to be impactful mechanics with a foundation that represents our current game design that also allows for the flexibility of changing that game design in the coming months.

An incredibly important part of a rogue-lite is that the levels are procedurally generated. We are going with a classic dungeon-like level design where the level is broken up into rooms that are placed in a random orientation and location, as well as random objects within each room to create an ever-changing game that won't get visually stale too quickly. In preparations for a proof of concept for level generation, I wanted to stay in scope and decided that all the rooms would need four doorways, one in each cardinal direction, the distance between those doorways would have to be the same across rooms, and that all the doorways from each room variation would have to line up. To test my future implementation, I made 4 identical rooms with 4 "door" objects that when enabled, blended in with the wall, and when disabled, made an actual doorway. Each room was a different color, and the spawn room was yellow, which would only spawn once.

First Implementation

Second Implementation

This was a fairly good generation, and the only room that was cut off completely was the blue room towards the top. It represents what I was going for though.

Final Implementation

(This is not 2000 rooms, sorry).