The Return of the Dungeon Generator

So, no, I hadn't forgotten about it, but with my tendency to procrastinate as soon as life gives me a break, this project had been gathering dust for quite some time.
Against all odds, I dug it out from the depths of a folder on my hard drive with the idea of reworking it, or even (crazy and pretentious as I am) finishing it, trying at the same time to conquer—for once—one of my most persistent demons: projects started but never finished. Thanks to global warming, I was able to spend a few days cooped up indoors to escape the heat and work on continuing this project.
Well, actually, I started it all over from scratch :)
Still built on Lua (which reminds me of my first love, Tcl) and its Löve framework (for doing 2D without reinventing the wheel).
So here’s a more or less stable version of Isometric Dungeon Generator (aka IDG). And yes, I know, it’s not an isometric projection, but who cares—it’s just its nickname.

So, what exactly does this revenant from beyond the grave do?
It lets you:

  • randomly generate dungeons with square rooms and straight corridors with turns
  • scatter doors (possibly secret ones), pillars, traps, pits, skeletons, and of course treasures throughout them
  • influence all that randomness by adjusting the weights that govern the spawning of these objects
  • render all of this using sprites that I half-stole (shh) and half-made myself
  • export a superb .png of the whole thing
  • and also export a .json file

What does it look like?
A zoomable overview of the dungeon:

A zoomable “internal” view of the dungeon that lets you visualize the underlying logic behind object generation:

A configuration window to control (to some extent) the parameters of the generated dungeon:



So, in the end, what’s the point of all this?

  • Well, for starters, so I can look at my screen and say out loud: “Did you see that? I did it!” (and, incidentally, to post here once every two years)
  • To accept that I’ll always be light-years away from the quality of projects like Dungeon Map Generator (acceptance's always the first step)
  • And it’s the first step toward my original idea: coding a single-player dungeon crawler, in the style of 2D6 Dungeon, even though lately I’ve been eyeing 5 Torches Deep more (I love the tension of managing torches)

See you in 3 years. And remember:

None of us are promised tomorrow. Life is uncertain. So... eat your dessert first.

Peace. Out.

(yes, the last sentences were a bit Matthew Colville influenced. Just a bit)