Tuesday, November 24, 2009

More Map Madness

So, I don't want to call the map generator "done" yet, but it's good enough for me to move on I think. It now handles all the cases I think are important enough for my first pass. Here's a picture of a map (with FOV turned off) to give you an idea.





As I mentioned before, I've nicknamed this map generator "Stitches". I took some inspiration from torchlight when I came up with the idea. Since it reads "chunks" from a file, if I keep adding more and unique chunks, better quality maps should result. For example here is one of the room chunks:

7 7 MainRoom
###^###
#.....#
#.M#M.#
^.###.^
#.M#M.#
#.....#
###^###

The '^'s are where the map generator can connect up other segments, '#'s are walls, and 'M' are monsters.

Now that both generators are "good enough", I can concentrate on my next tasks. I have two iterations planned before my text "tech demo" release.

Iteration 6 (Current)
  • Map Generator Work
  • Multiple levels, with stairs connecting
  • Help Screen
Iterator 7 (Combat)
  • Wands
  • Multiple monster types (more on this in another post)
  • More spell effects
  • Color!


2 comments:

that_robot said...

interesting. not only am i trying to scrape together a roguelike, i am also using a very similar method for map generation. i think this technique works very well - you can give an artist a bit more control over the presentation of the randomized dungeons, and create as much variance as you want.

nice work.

donblas said...

Yeah, the nice part is that if you want more varied dungeons, you just have to add more "chunks" to generate from.