Hi everyone. I'm the programmer on this project and I'll be posting some interesting stuff here sometimes maybe. Here's what I currently have implemented for how part of the procedural generation in the game will work (also posted
here):
Generate a grid:
Color the grid with x red rooms (hard), y blue rooms (medium) and z green rooms (easy) such that x+y+z = n rooms in the grid (x, y, z can be changed to control difficulty):
- First color it with x red rooms such that no red room (or most red rooms) has another same colored neighbor (this can be changed if dungeon difficulty should be higher);
- Then for each red room color one neighbor blue and one neighbor green;
- Color the rest of the rooms with the remaining number of rooms for each color.
Choose two nodes that are far apart enough and then find a path between them while mostly avoiding red rooms. If you choose a proper x, since red rooms can’t be neighbors to themselves and the pathfinding algorithm doesn’t go for diagonals, it should create a not so direct path from one node to the other.
For all nodes in the path, add their red[, green, blue] neighbors. This should add the possibility of side paths and overall complexity/difficulty in the dungeon.
Join smaller grids into bigger ones according to predefined room sizes. Higher chance of smaller width/height and lower chance of bigger width/height. In games like Isaac this doesn’t exist, since all rooms are of the same size, but why constrain myself like that?
Generate all possible connections between rooms.
Randomly remove connections until a certain number of connections per room is met. If n = total rooms, then set n*x rooms with >=4 connections, n*y with 3, n*z with 2 and n*w with 1, such that x+y+z+w=1. Controlling x, y, z and w lets you control how mazy the dungeon gets. If z or w are considerably higher than x or y then there won’t be many “hub” rooms that connect different paths, so it’s gonna have lots of different thin paths with dead ends. If x or y are higher then the dungeon will be super connected and therefore easier.
Reconnect isolated “islands”. Since step 7 is completely random, there’s a big chance that rooms or groups of rooms will become unreachable.
To fix that:
- Flood fill to figure out how many isolated groups exist;
- Pick a group at random and go through its rooms. For each room check if it neighbors a room belonging to another group, if it does then connect them and end the search;
- Repeat the previous steps until there’s only one group left (everyone’s connected).
And that’s it, I guess. There’s more stuff like adding special rooms, but that’s specific to each game, so whatever. But basically I have a few parameters I can control when creating a new dungeon: dungeon width/height; percentage of hard, medium and easy rooms; what color neighbors get added to the original path and the percentage of rooms with >=4, 3, 2 or 1 connections. I think that’s enough to have control of how easy/hard the dungeon will be…
