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[ndnninja15]

I've been playing a little bit of Spelunky and have come across a few other rogue-likes and can't help but wonder how they accomplish random level generation. Of course tiles need to match in order to create the proper aesthetic but the program goes beyond that in its object placement.

What is the high level logic/design approach for random level generation?

[alvarop]

Did you watch this ?



Did you read this ? http://tinysubversions.com/spelunkyGen/

I pretty much made the level generation of my game based on these principles. My game is open source, so you can check the code if you'd like.

[DireLogomachist]

Might I suggest the Spelunky book by Derek Yu?
https://bossfightbooks.com/collections/books/products/spelunky-by-derek-yu



I read it and loved it. It goes into a ton of detail about the design work, but here's a taste just from what I remember from it.

Each level is divided into a 4x4 grid of sub-pieces that are made of 10x10 tiles.

Like so:



From there he carves out a critical path using some maze-creation-esque algorithm.



And then he randomizes non-critical path features like treasure, enemies, traps, and additional obstacles.

Hope that helps!

[bateleur]

More generally, this kind of thing falls under procedural content generation... for which these forums have an entire thread: Procedural Resource Dump

[ndnninja15]

Cool, thanks for the information guys.