DungeonMaker
How Dungeons are Created
First, you can put as many pre-placed design elements into the dungeon as you
like, such as guaranteed-open spaces, or rooms and walls. You can use these
to place special NPC's and other story hooks, for which you want a specific
environment. The DungeonMaker then constructs a random dungeon around these
pre-placed elements. This is done by a population of Builders, little
alife-agents which scurry through the dungeon, leaving walls or tunnels in
their wake.
Where the background of the dungeon is open, Builders of subclass
WallCrawler (referred to as Crawlers) are active
building walls. Where the background is closed, Tunnelers do their
thing. While Crawlers only spawn other Crawlers, Tunnelers also spawn
Roomies, which (surprise!) make rooms. This whole process is governed by
a large number of parameters, which are specified in a design-file.
Every Builder belongs to a specific generation, with generation X starting
its life only after generation X-1 has died out. Builders die either because
they have run out of space, or
because they have reached their maximum age. While they are alive, they make
a series of steps, which consist of building a stretch of wall or tunnel,
possibly changing direction, and possibly spawning one or two babies.
Crawlers
The behavior of a solitary Crawler is dominated by the parameters
corrWidth (which determines how much space it leaves between the walls
it builds and other closed squares), stepLength (which determines how
many open squares it can fill with wall squares each step), and
changeDirProb (which is the percentage of cases in which this Crawler
will change direction at the end of a step). The first two parameters are
the same for all members of one generation, whereas the third is inherited
(with some random mutation) from the parent Crawler. Inherited parameters
make it possible to have labyrinths with different characteristics in different
regions (depending on the parameters of the
design Crawlers which are the ancestors of their respective regions),
whereas per-generation
parameters help to ensure that Crawlers work well together and make it easy to
enforce a desired frequency of walls/open spaces in a design.
Crawlers can come into existence as design Crawlers, whose parameters
are specified in the design file (overriding parameters normally determined by
generation), or as RandCrawlers, which randomly start off the edge of
the map. All RandCrawlers have the same inheritable parameters, and in the
design file we can specify the probabilities with which they will be born in any
given generation. While design Crawlers can be "closed", which allows
them to join an existing wall and thus makes it possible to block a passage, all
RandCrawlers and baby Crawlers are "open", and must leave an opening at the end of
their run. This means that, unless the designer has placed closed Crawlers in
the wrong place, the Crawlers will never cut off a part of the labyrinth.
Everything is guaranteed to remain accessible.
Tunnelers
Tunnelers are much more complicated than Crawlers. While Crawlers only build
walls that are one square wide, Tunnelers can build tunnels of any uneven width.
They can also build anterooms, which are most often placed in front of
rooms, or at the intersection of tunnels, and which I envision to be places
where the MOBs (mobile objects inhabiting the dungeon) meet and socialize. Finally,
they can spawn Roomies. Roomies are Builders that make just one step, or none:
If they see enough closed space for the size of room they want to excavate, they
build their room in one fell swoop when their generation comes alive, otherwise
they self-destruct.
Tunnelers only come into existence as design Tunnelers, or as babies. Usually
there's one design Tunneler starting at every entrance to the dungeon that
leads into an area of closed squares, and at every door to a pre-placed room
in such closed areas. While Tunnelers are fond of joining with each other
and of busting into rooms,
in general there is no guarantee that they will do so, and it is possible
that the tunnel systems made by two Tunnelers and their offspring will never connect.
If one Tunneler starts from a dungeon entry, and another from an exit, then
the software that uses the DungeonMaker will have to test that the two points have
in fact been connected, and run the Dungeonmaker again with another random
seed if they are not. This is a special case of a playability-test,
which we expect to implement for any commercial use of the DungeonMaker, and
which would generally test for more criteria than mere connectedness.
Miscellaneous
After all the Builders have run their course, the DungeonMaker can do two more
things. It can place rooms in open areas that have been worked by Crawlers -
this is done by searching for areas that can be turned into closed rooms by placing
a door in a single square. And then it can place treasure and MOBs. This
process will have to be fine-tuned for every single game the DungeonMaker is
used for, and has been implemented as a generic demonstration only. While the
Dungeonmaker can place treasure and MOBs of an unlimited number of categories,
the graphic program boils it all down to 3 colors each, with the more lively
colors being used for bigger treasure and MOBs.
The demo program that presents the output of the DungeonMaker shows the
construction of the dungeons as a movie. This is interesting to watch and, if
you watch it enough, will give you a deep intuitive insight into the dungeon
creation process. I was able to greatly improve on the performance of the Crawlers
in version 2 after having watched their version 1 brethren do their thing
thousands of times. Tunnelers are new in version 2, and a similar improvement
in future versions of the program seems possible - I have a few ideas, but before
I radically re-write the Tunnelers I want to ponder them for a few months.
The demo program recognizes 3 command line arguments: ' -d ' gives extra
information which is useful for the design-process, and ' -+ ' and
' -- ' can be used to scale the size of the map -
' -- '
makes the map smaller, and will speed up the dungeon movie.
After the program has presented a dungeon, you
must close the window where it is shown, whereupon you will be presented, on the
command line, with the choice to enter 'q' for 'quit the program', 'n' for
'next design', or 'r' for 'repeat this design with a different
random seed'.
I urge you to choose r as often as you have time and patience in order to
see both the variability and the similarity of dungeons made from one design
file.
On the following pages we show examples of the dungeons constructed from the
design files that come with the program, we comment on the designs, and explain
as many important details of the program as we can think of. We recommend reading
these pages concurrently with running the program, like this:
go forth now and
enjoy !
yourself with the DungeonMaker
