One Page Dungeon Generator, Hacker News

I’m confused about something on the maps . Some of the corridors and rooms are separated by walls from the rest of the dungeon. As rooms 4, 5, 6 and 8 on the example map, Monastery of the Silent Dragon.

I assume those are rooms with secret entrances, where you have to figure out there’s a room, how to find the entrance and then get through it?

So cool, I haven’t played D&D since my teen years in the late 1970 ‘s, but this powerfully evoked the intense sense of narrative possibility and the excitement of adventure that I recall experiencing as a minor player in the Cornell University campaign of that decade. Brilliant!

Hi 🙂

As always, your work is really inspirational for me, as I’ve always been into procedural gen as long as I can remember.

This one is nothing less than amazing: the visual result is almost perfect

Do you think it would be possible to export the generated map as a JSON or something similar, so I can add an import function on my RPG Map tool (available on Itch.io)?

This is delightful for a number of reasons. Back in the paleolithic age, some buddies of mine and I that were working together on a linguistic computing project on an IBM 370 / 138 wrote a bunch of programs in SNOBOL4 to do just this – text only, of course, but they still run in my Virtual XP mode. We could specify number of rooms, level of complexity, and other parameters as well.

Example:

There are stairs leading down into an antechamber. The chamber is square, (x) in size, with two passages leading off to the southeast.

Room number 2 is rectangular, (x) in size.
The door through which this room is entered is a secret door made of metal and is locked with an invisible button on the right side of the door. In addition, there are 3 other exits from the room.
There are 12 skeletons in the room! There is also treasure here, which is contained in stone jars and is hidden by an illusion. The trove consists of 3000 silver pieces. In addition, you find 750 gold pieces here.

Room number 3 is trapezoidal, about 3400 sq. ft. in size.
The door through which this room is entered is made of wood and is open. In addition, there are 2 other exits from the room.
There are 3 shriekers in the room!

Etc.

I’m delighted that someone took up the torch and brought this idea into the 21 st century!

A text based dungeon generator actually sounds super awesome for solo play! You’ve inspired me to build my own game lol. Do you have any insights or tips for designing the logic behind the dungeon generator?

My initial plan was to create a generator that would generate stories (just text) about wandering in such dungeons:)

There will be a post where I’m going to outline how my generator works, but actually there are dozens of algorithms of all kinds for creating dungeon maps.

Cool! Did your generator take the geometry of a dungeon into account? I mean was it possible to map a dungeon following the descriptions or it was more like a graph without specific coordinates for its nodes?

Wow! Awesome work. You really are a good fellow! I’d like to get it in another language (french). Is your code ready for easy translation?

Not ready, no 🙂 But I’ll try to find a way to fix it.

This is fantastic, and very entertaining! Would you consider changing the subheading to read “… until recently it was …” or “… until it was recently …”?

Does it sound wrong / bad? I tried to keep the wording in accordance with a kind of abrupt style of notes …

This is quite awesome!

There’s a small bug: if you toggle the title several times, the notes start wandering around. Toggling the notes again restores them to their correct position:)

This is quite impressive! I hope you add some more goodies in the future, like round rooms, curving corridors, some irregularities in the walls like alcoves … I know you keep improving your creations, so I am looking forward to future additions: D

I’ve seen a lot of dungeon generators with a lot of bells and whistles, but they always inevitably produce dungeons with a lot of errant hallways, dead ends, and weird layouts. This is the first procedural dungeon generator I’ve seen that actually makes dungeons that feel like they’d make sense, and doesn’t lead to a lot of winding, unnecessary paths.

This is very good tbh.

Thank you! That was one of the goals – to make dungeons, which would look like once they had some normal purpose other than to be a “death maze”:)

I feel so dumb, but, how do i use it ?, i don’t know where the generator is

Hit refresh in your browser.

Awesome! m / Thank you very much!

Fantastic stuff! Thanks for sharing.

This generator looks great! Where did you get the tile set / textures for your maps? Were they created by hand?

Thank you. Nothing here is created by hand, everything is built and drawn procedurally.

Do you have any resources on how the textures / art were created procedurally ? I’m impressed by the hashing against the walls. Thanks!

I think I’ll have to write post about this hatching …

I would definitely read a post on that! that sounds amazing

I’m learning to code, I would love to learn how to do something like. ..

Is there a chance to see the source code?

If it’s procedural generation of the dungeon what you’re interested in,this tutorial might come in handy. Part 3, in particular, shows you how to create a basic dungeon generator that will produce something similar to this tool. Alternatively, I havesome code here, made in Processing.

Well..like I said I’m just starting out, but this goes a long way.

So quick question: what is Processing?

It’s a programming environment with an unfortunate name, hehe. It makes googling a pain. It’s very easy to draw stuff, you can find it here:https://processing.org/The dungeon generation algorithm doesn’t really require it though, it should possible to follow in whatever language you’re using.

http://openprocessing.orgis a good place to start …

Awesome, thanks! Hopefully one day I can learn enough to actually do this on my own!

nice work. would there be anyway to add an option to save a generated dungeon as a PDF file?

… If I decide to continue developing this generator, I’ll add a proper export button …

Thanks, definitely will be nice to see it progress forward.

Currently, you can save by right clicking.

neat, this is an excellent beginning to what i hope will be a tool as robust as your fantasy city generator! Excellent work.

My inner 1977 DM approves 100%!

Edit: Just figured out you are the creator of Myst (not that myst but another myst) always impressed with your work. Tossed you a coin!

Nice! I have no use for this at the moment, but I love the idea:)

Beautiful! Can’t tell you how timely this is. I had dungeon tiles at the ready but needed a quick randomizer for our game tonight. Thanks for everything you do! Our table really benefits from your work.

very nice. some rooms come with no door though. it would be nice to have an option to enter a minimum / maximum size. if interested in dungeon tiles or probs I don’t mind sharing what I have or draw extra stuff if you want.

https://www.deviantart.com/gabrielbaroen/gallery/ 62473719 / dungeontiles

probably secret doors, or at least that’s what I assumed.

Exactly:

The idea is “like a wall, but not exactly like a real wall”

how do you export / save generated dungeons?

You can right-click and choose “Save image as …” (or something similar) in most browsers! It’ll export the whole dungeon, including the title and text at the top.

If you change toggle the notes off / on and repeat the image save , you can create a DM copy and a player copy!

mmmm it looks like it doesn’t work on Firefox: /

That’s super weird, I’m not sure why Firefox is just outputting an empty PNG. @watabou says below that he may add a proper export button in the future if he continues development, but in the meanwhile, you may need to install Chrome to save it without just taking a screenshot.

Surprisingly the method described by @alamantus doesn’t work in Firefox, but you still can take a screenshot. If I decide to continue developing this generator, I’ll add a proper export button.

the “Export” function is working great!

I think generator should include the size of dungeon option.

The generator wasn’t planned as something really useful, it’s just a toy. It chooses the size basing on the name, for example abbeys are always large and chapels are small. Depending on the future of the project I’ll probably add some customization options.

This is seriously awesome for something you’ve just bashed together for a monthly challenge. I think the notes would work better as prompts rather than specific things. Use the old DMG room classifications of of Guardian, Challenge, puzzle, combat, Trap, Treasure, Treasure with monster, treasure with trap.

I’m not familiar with this classification, but it sounds very close to what I was going to implement initially. For example, I hadMonsters, (Trap) ,Guarded Treasure(=MonstersTreasure) etc. Only (Treasure) and (Event) (NPC|Curiosity) got into the published version.