Rogueotron - Adventures in Procedural Generation

I’m a couple of days into development on Rogueotron now and the basics are starting to come together a bit. Thanks to the horrors of Regular Paid Employment I’ve only been able to put a couple of hours a night into it during the week but I’ve managed to get the basic movement/firing and transitions between rooms working with some stylishly blocky placeholder graphics.

Not about to win any awards for visuals any time soon, I admit… The next job on the list if I want to have any business describing this as any kind of roguelike is procedurally generated maps. Since this is based on Robotron, I’m planning on generating the map as a series of rooms rather than the more continous dungeon layout of most roguelikes. Something along the lines of Smash TV seems appropriate. To make the maps a bit more interesting than just pure randomness, I’m borrowing the Environment Tree mechanic from Three Hundred Mechanics, which is an all-round excellent resource for all things procgen related. I’ve already played with the idea back when I was working on Gun Bastard so I know it’s pretty easy to tweak the tree-generation described in the article to generate the kind of map I want. I’ve currently got a nice little Python implementation up and running that looks a bit like this:

It’s a little rough on item placement right now, and could do with some tweaking to filter out “boring” maps but it should make for a decent base to build on once I get it ported over to Java.