Dungeon Generation: Multi-Tile Spanning Art Support
I spent all day Sunday making some improvements to the random dungeon generator (for great justice). I had wanted to release a new demo build for you to play with, but it's not really there just yet, so I've captured a screen shot:
The rooms you see here are a special type of room in the dungeon definition: They have an art file depicting the entire floorplan of the room, rather than a collection of art files for each tile within it. This will be instrumental in providing personality to the architecture and environment of the dungeons. The tech involved will be used beyond the actual architecture though, for various dungeon features that take up multiple tiles, or even large monsters that can't fit into a single tile.
There you can take a closer look at my placeholder art depicting some sort of magic summoning circle (I envisioned this dungeon as some sort of summoner's tower). Done with a combination of some "magic runes brushes" found online and some extensive use of filters and blending options in Photoshop, I'm simultaneously quite proud of them and quite embarrassed by them. Possibly my best work yet in Photoshop, which I think explains why I'm both proud and embarrassed! I think it also explains why I don't teach any Photoshop classes.
Perhaps also worth noting that there were significant advances made in the way that I can define rooms for dungeons, and the way that I can intelligently describe the dungeon's make up in code. The end result is a much more powerful generator, with significant implications into not only the aesthetics of the dungeon, but also the gameplay, and potentially even getting into procedurally generating some pseudo-narrative. I promise to describe that in a bit more detail at some point, but there's other aspects of the generator that I have to talk about first, or it won't make sense, so it'll have to wait for a later update.
For the curious, my next immediate steps on the generator all involve fixing some glaring problems, which is a bit boring. I've come up with a plan to make room placement more efficient, I want to refactor a couple of class definitions, and then I want to tackle rooms that only allow entrances in a specified place on the room, rather than anywhere. I think that's all I have to tackle before moving on to dungeon population, but we'll see.
Tags: Actionscript, art support, Dungeon Dice, dungeon generator, rooms