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Tag Archives: Map Generation

Level Design and Shaping a Cogmind Experience

For years I’ve been taking a pretty standardized approach to designing each new map in Cogmind, and although we have dozens of them now, it’s one of the few topics I’ve never covered on the blog. This is essentially because a serious in-depth look at the entire process would require spoiling a lot of content, […]

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Debugging Mapgen Seed Divergence

I rather enjoy debugging. It’s just another type of puzzle, one of the many challenges of gamedev approached with logic and the tools at hand. It should be noted I actually don’t much like debugging if it involves a bunch of code I didn’t write, but this is why I almost entirely use my own […]

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2018 7DRL Postmortem, Part 3: Spending Too Long on Map Generation and Content

Picking up where we left off at the end of Part 2, about the early days working on the core interface and mechanics… Map Generation I spent an entire day just working on map generation. At the end of that day my desk looked like this: All the maps use my tunneling algorithm from Cogmind, […]

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Map Prefabs, in Depth

An increasingly common approach to roguelike map development today is to have content partially determined by so-called “prefabs,” with layouts which are hand-made rather than fully procedurally generated. Doing so gives a designer more control over the experience, or portions of it at least, without completely supplanting the advantages of roguelike unpredictability. Prefabs are a […]

Posted in Design, Dev Series: Procedural Maps | Also tagged , , , , | 2 Responses

Generating and Populating Caves

Before this point, the vast majority of Cogmind maps have fallen under the room-and-corridor style generation. The wide range of adjustable parameters, when combined with a variety of themed content (and prefabs!), give that one style plenty of potential to create a unique feel and gameplay for different areas of the world. That said, roguelikes […]

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