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The Return of the Dungeon Generator

- Posted in D&D by

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)

Dungeon generator

- Posted in D&D by

I recently stumbled upon this awesome free online Dungeon Map Generator, which gives you really nice ready to use maps like this:
enter image description here

While trying to build such a generator from scratch, I quickly came to the conclusion that this one is in fact much more complete and complex that it appears at first sight (and you realize that once you've tried to build your own):

  • Maps are not just orthogonal, they're nicely rotated
  • Walls are sexy
  • Rooms can be round
  • Rooms have notes

So yes, I'm trying to build my own map generator (got the idea while playing the solo Dungeon Crawler 2D6 Dungeon, which is by the way as cheap as excellent) and after a few hours of Lua, right now my generated maps look like this (beware, it's all but as sexy as above): enter image description here

There's a French proverb that says “when I look at myself I feel sorry, when I compare myself I feel comforted”.
Well, right now I'm much more sorry than comforted :)
So now I've got some work, first debug (the doors are badly placed, the corridors too numerous), rooms should be numbered in a clever way, and then make the output a little prettier (as far as the look is concerned there's definitively room for improvement).
And then generate levels interconnected by stairs :)

Why spend hours trying to do this when very nice free tools already exist?
Because “Its the not the destination, it's the journey.”
Peace out.