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[diegzumillo]

So I'm trying to make a system that allows the user to create dungeons, in the most simple and intuitive way possible. And as flexible as possible too, thus curved corridors and different heights are important. I have a few ideas I'd like to share and if anyone wants to share their own it would be great

First idea: The user creates nodes and connects them, the program tries to create rooms and corridors that fit that network. Nodes can have properties that may reflect in room sizes and stuff like that. What I don't like in this idea is that I don't know how the user would change the shape of the rooms, for example.

Second idea: The user creates the floor(s), it can be a simple big plane or with bumps etc. Then he draws the walls simply clicking and dragging. Additional tweaking to the end result would be nice...

[BorisTheBrave]

Well, if you want to brainstorm, why not let the user draw in black and white, and then you convert it into something, smooth out the walls, squarify rooms, etc.

[Evan Balster]

You want something maximally simple to use, so go for the idea which could be explained to the user in the smallest amount of words.  "Draw the floors.  Then, press this button and draw walls."

Nodes might seem to simplify the system and reduce time investment, but in reality they make it harder to understand, which is ultimately bad news.  People are fine scribbling for a few seconds to fill in a box; scribbling is easy.

[bateleur]

To be genuinely easy to use you need to think in terms of simplifying basic actions. As such, I don't think you want the user to be drawing rooms or een setting properties, they should just be dragging rooms in from a pallette of premade ones. Then have an "advanced" feature which lets users make their own rooms.

Rather than everything being configurable, everything should just do something non-stupid by default. So I should just be able to dump a room messily overlapping a bunch of existing stuff and the engine should do all the thinking. Things like "this corridor intersects the new room, so it needs to split into two corridors each with a door where it meets the room". Again, you can have an "advanced" feature which lets the user configure the door type and size, manually control corridor curvatures and so on if they want to.

[vids]

I tried random dungeon generation once, ran into this great example.

http://donjon.bin.sh/d20/dungeon/

[Chromanoid]

For 3D dungeons I would try "rail/clip editing". You have basic tiles that allow the addition of other tiles at specific docking points. For corridors something like this might be a nice additional feature.