Author: Ramon Rodriguez IV
Posted 6/13/24

This is the first post of the devlog. Of course, since everything starts from nothing, we had no bugs to go through, but we did have a lot of ideas to implement. With this in mind, we decided to implement what we thought the game needed the most. As such, I started work on the game's random level generation. This will be one of the main pillars of our game, but it's still very early in development.

I had to block out a basic design for the rooms that would spawn. They're all currently four-doored, square rooms. Initially, they were small, roofless rooms that were too small for the game we were going for. The version in the gif, which uses the most recent block-out for these rooms, are larger, have a roof and spots for items, though we don't have the system to spawn those items, nor items in general, so they're just there as a placeholder. I had to make a script to actually attach the rooms and determine which doors should or should not be present. This uses a Breadth-First Search algorithm, and a lot of lists to check and uncheck Booleans, so over all, it was a lot of work, but once it did work, it was easy to make changes.

In future, I intend for this system to support multiple room types, have a dedicated start and end room, and for the randomization to be more complex in general, but it already has some futureproofing. The randomization code has options for changing the size of the generated map, and choosing where the start point will be in the algorithm. I think it's pretty decent for the first week of work. The rooms also need to be stylized, but we're still working on the game's basics, so this is what I have so far.