Corridors considered harmful

[SarahW]

No procedural content generation => not a roguelike.

Not necessarily, it depends on how it's done. There is a wide area between having something have static dungeons, and having something be "truly random". By definition, truly random ends up looking like a mess.

What you want in something in between. You have a limited number of dungeon designs, but the game shuffles between these different designs. You might have only three designs, or you might have over 2,000 designs.

The way I figured it out is to create mini-levels, and have a state machine shuffle randomly between different levels. There seems be a lack of tutorials on it, is how to specifically do procedural randomness. Most of the few out there is either behind a paywall, or it's in some other language besides Ruby.

On the other hand, badly written random can look like this.

Code: [Select]

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Not the kind of level I really get anything out of playing. And it creates more work for the programmer for people that is just beginning to code.

[Skeletor]

I see; semi-random generation through randomly selected predetermined chunks. That's an interesting concept indeed, as long as there is plenty of chunks available so that dungeons never feel samey.

[SarahW]

I see; semi-random generation through randomly selected predetermined chunks. That's an interesting concept indeed, as long as there is plenty of chunks available so that dungeons never feel samey.

Just finished it in a couple of days. It's not going to be perfect. This one is called Nihilist.^ ^

[Troubler]

I'll go a step farther and say dungeons are harmful.
I'm sick of being underground all the time, I want to do something else.
Procedural generation can be applied to a lot more than just dungeons.

[SarahW]

I've been thinking about that actually, would a roguelike even work inside the context of a spaceship?

Historically I'd make a spaceship be represented by letter P, and an enemy spaceship called E.

But increasingly, I'm considering having the Spaceship be the dungeon itself. But that in itself would largely change how one would go about doing procedural generation. Something like, the spaceship design reminds constant, but the surrounded space is procedurally generated. The spaceship itself would be something like a "home" state.

[Troubler]

I've been thinking about that actually, would a roguelike even work inside the context of a spaceship?

Historically I'd make a spaceship be represented by letter P, and an enemy spaceship called E.

But increasingly, I'm considering having the Spaceship be the dungeon itself. But that in itself would largely change how one would go about doing procedural generation. Something like, the spaceship design reminds constant, but the surrounded space is procedurally generated. The spaceship itself would be something like a "home" state.

I've seen it done a few times before, both inside a spaceship dungeon and piloting a spaceship.
But usually when it is a dungeon, the spaceship just kind of works as a generic dungeon with a theme.
Prospector had space exploration in a spaceship, and Gearhead 2 had space combat with some simple physics.

I think another game by the guy who made gearhead called deadcold had a unique dungeon design for a space station.
But then it was pretty simplistic and not complete. Though its layout seemed pretty modular like what you describe.

[Troubler]

I'll go a step farther and say dungeons are harmful.
I'm sick of being underground all the time, I want to do something else.
Procedural generation can be applied to a lot more than just dungeons.

I was just thinking of this post recently while playing Omega.
Take a look at this randomly generated outdoors section made for an encounter, it is exactly what I am thinking of.

If you stretched this out some it would make for a really interesting overworld. This is what Cataclysm's outdoors should look more like.
There are too many roguelikes where "wilderness" just means an open plain with a few trees you can easily walk around.
Unlike the typical dungeon there are both hard and soft barriers here. The green hedges and grey rocks can snag you to slow you down, and rivers just drown you.

[Krice]

I was thinking about the scale recently and in "real life" rooms are (often) small compared to corridors which are at least 2 tiles wide and mostly straight pieces. If you think about the layout of real life house it's quite different than a roguelike dungeon. Then again dungeons are supposed to be more cave-like, but yet another again many caves are a lot like regular houses in that they don't have extremely long narrow corridors with large rooms such as classical roguelikes. This is something to think about if you want to create more "realistic" layouts I guess. I think reducing the overall length and amount of corridors would be something to try at least.