Dungeons!

Last week I implemented dungeons, or at least their skeletons. Right now just big rectangular rooms are being dug out, but the dungeons go all the way down to the bottom layer connected by ramps. It doesn’t look too exciting right now, but eventually, each of these skeleton rooms will get a special room painter to dig out a cavern or a troll den or a dwarven bedroom or other interesting things for the kobolds to explore.

Dungeon Skeleton

The skeleton of a dungeon in a mountainous region

 

This skeleton is generated using the subdivision method, which takes the whole area and repeadedly slices it in two until the desired room size is reached.

Diagram of dungeon subdivision

Next, a start and end room are selected. Preferably they are very far apart. An A* path is used to link the rooms together between start and end. After that, all other rooms are linked to these rooms

Link rooms together

Now you can stop here if you want boxy square dungeons. If you don’t, some of these rooms need to be pruned. The next part is hard to show with such small diagrams. Basically calculate all the room “tendrils” that grow from the main path. In the diagram below, the main path is yellow. We want to keep that. The tendrils are orange. Start pruning these tendrils from the ends until the desired number of rooms is reached.

Prune dead ends

The result of this is a basic dungeon shape that can now be decorated any way you like.


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What is Lair of the Kobolds?

What’s the first thing you think of when you hear about a kobold? Cannon fodder?  Little nuggets of exp? Quest monsters for noobs? Well the kobolds have had enough of that stereotype. Sure they start out as cannon fodder, but under your guidance perhaps they can survive long enough to flourish and maybe even prove themselves.

The idea for the game started out with the 48 hour game programming contest, Ludum Dare. The theme for Ludum Dare 15  was caverns, and what lives in caverns? Goblins! Goblins who could perhaps set traps to kill any invading adventurers as well as clearing the caverns of trolls. The result of the 48 hours wasn’t exactly a work of art, but the seed of the idea was there.

Work continued on the game. Where I implemented mining, smelting, and the gathering of food. Unfortunately, I didn’t have much time to work on it and pushed it aside.

Recently I’ve started it up again, coding it with a full 3D Voxel engine. Also I’ve changed the monster of choice to kobolds, since they have some interesting gameplay elements and they don’t get enough recognition. I will be posting more information on the game here as it is implemented.

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