Herbert Wolverson - Procedural Map Generation Techniques

This talk is from the 2020 virtual Roguelike Celebration:

Herbert has been a hobby game developer since the 1990s, and is the developer of Nox Futura, One Knight in the Dungeon, and several 7DRL projects. Author of the Rust Roguelike Tutorial, and upcoming book with the working title Learn Rust by Making a Game book (Pragmatic Bookshelf, expected release this winter). He's a regular contributor to the subreddit r/roguelikedev.

This talk is a detailed survey of procedural map generation, including integration of hand-crafted "prefabs"/vaults. While the source material is written in Rust, it's readily abstracted to psuedocode and presented in a language agnostic fashion. Techniques include: Simple room placement, BSP room placement, BSP interiors, cellular automata, drunkard's walk, mazes, diffusion-limited aggregation, voronoi, wave function collapse, and prefabs. Sprinkle in a little spice by adding symmetry, layering/combining generators, different corridor algorithms, and doors placement.

[henrykkaufman]

Dude, that's one of the most useful presentations on game programming I've ever seen.

[JoeGeorge]

Man I wish this talk just went for another 30 minutes, very nice

[Zadhompl]

Topic of my thesis is based around procedural generation and this video alone provided enough info to speed up my progress threefold.
Cheers, Herbert Wolverson is a living legend in my eyes.

[alexanderdiogenes]

Just finished Section 3 of your Rust Roguelike tutorial (decoupling the map from the viewport). It is fantastic. I've learned so much, and I've fallen in love with Rust as a language! Thanks for bracketlib and rltk, in particular.

[joewilliams]

I keep coming back to this one, brilliant resource

[Vedranation]

Amazing presentation. Clean, easy to understand, with great visualition. Thank you

[ZackLivestone]

Solid rapid fire overview, really appreciated!

[jspiro]

This deserves thousands more comments. Thanks for putting this catalog together for us!

[marcomoscoso]

this video and the person explaining are golden!

[arlowicks]

Probably one of the best resources online for procedural map generation principles.

[amitdagan]

thats was amazing!
i feel so inspired right now

[bobbob]

Giving me the idea to place tile objects first and then do the subtraction with a separate object just saved me a lot of time messing with noisemaps in arrays.

[naphipps]

Another technique I love to use is domain warping with perturb techniques. (Inigo Quilez has awesome articles on these topics, for those interested.)

[pik]

If you want to make a Voronoi diagram in a discrete space a fast and easy way to do that is to grow it. E.g. for Manhattan distance: draw the border of a rectangle around the seed each step and grow that. You can stop growing an individual seed if no empty pixels were found. That makes it very fast even with a high amount of seeds.

[hugobarbachano]

Awesome, can´t wait to tinker with this !

[olmrgreen]

Awesome video! I've learned so much in a very easy and basic way about things I thought were complicated as hell.

[RetsaGames]

Amazing talk, makes everything look so simple

[KoN]

really interesting and informative. i'm not that big of a programmer, but i tried things like this and played around with rooms and corridors in python and pygame(just some rooms and corridors).. i was thinking way too complicated. the video really opened my eyes how easy it could be if you think just a bit around the corner. thanks!

[Algorhythmic]

Very useful info. Love the humor as well.

[MCRuCr]

I'm currently into godot-rust and I love it