I’m writing this at ~5am local time on Friday but I say it counts as Thursday’s Daily Dev because I started last night and, frankly, nobody’s going to argue with me.

Following on from the list of five things I wanted to do by next week, today’s Thing was dungeon map generation – having the game generate a level at random for our intrepid heroes to run around in.

Starting out was pretty simple, write a short method to build a room of a specified height and width, at specified x/y co-ordinates and wrap it in some logic to prevent it building over top of existing rooms. I even threw in some basic ‘theme’ functionality to switch out which tiles it uses for the floor and walls. The results are below, showing both the ‘flooded’ theme and the default:

The next part was considerably more complex – coming up with logic that would allow the game to build a network of rooms connected by corridors. Approaching it in stages, I started with a method that would pick an existing room, pick one of its sides, decide on dimensions for a corridor and new room at the end of it and, if it didn’t overlap existing rooms/corridors, go ahead and build it. The logic behind the exact co-ordinate setting took the most time by far, between making sure corridors and new rooms didn’t exceed the edges of their neighbours and working around Unity’s bizarre number generator (Random.Range(x, y) will return a value between x and (y-1), not x and y. Wish I’d know that sooner).

Anyway, the end result is pretty pleasing, a nice little dungeon map just begging for slavering beasts, pots of gold and adventurers with an appetite for filthy, filthy lucre: