Developing with a design driven approach: generating adaptable open world maps for "Treasure Tile". How to give a hand-crafted feel to randomly generated content.

1. Organic RNG Maps
Dalius Gražinskis
Golem House

3. Personal introduction
● Have worked in game industry since 2015
● Lead programmer in an indie game studio called Golem House
● Favourite games are “Diablo”, “Half Life” and “XCOM”

4. When to use RNG maps
● Replayability
● Dynamic content
● Unknown map layout is part of the design
● Otherwise supports the design

5. Problem definition
● Generate random, open area, maps
● Terrain variety
● Easy extension with new content
● Fitting everything
● Natural look
● Easy editing for artists and designers

6. Research

7. Path of Exile

8. Diablo III

9. XCOM 2

10. Map Editors

11. Resources
● Procedural Level Design in XCOM 2
○ https://youtu.be/5jrq5rDI4dk
● Procedural World Generation in Path of Exile
○ https://youtu.be/EXnoHTqO7TE
● Tile-Based Map Generation using Wave Function Collapse in 'Caves of Qud'
○ https://youtu.be/AdCgi9E90jw
● Herbert Wolverson - Procedural Map Generation Techniques
○ https://youtu.be/TlLIOgWYVpI

12. Basic structure
● Room stack
● Generating model
● Generating view

13. Room variety

14. Map events Enemies

15. Waypoint Quests locations

16. Generating Map Model

17. Room placement

18. Room prioritization

19. Room placement approaches
Naive Smart

20. Connecting the rooms

21. Delaunay triangulation
A Delaunay Triangulation is a specific type of
triangulation such that no triangle's points are
inside the circumcircle of any other triangle in
the triangulation.

22. Minimum spanning tree
A Minimum spanning tree connects all rooms
in such a way that all vertices are visited without
cycles with minimum number of edges.

23. Variable connectivity

24. Noise
White Worley Perlin

25. Drawing paths between rooms
Virtual terrain A* pathfinding through virtual
terrain

26. More “Natural”

27. Adding Noise

28. Erode and Dilate
Open (Erode => Dilate) Close (Dilate => Erode)

29. Cellular automaton
Conway’s Game of Life Dungeon generated with cellular
automaton

30. Cleanup

31. Varying settings
● Path size
● Dilate
● Noise density/scale
● Cellular Automaton birth/death rules
● Connectivity

32. Map Presentation

33. Processing stack
● Terrain
● Tile Textures and Clusters
● Decorations

34. Terrain - heightmap
● Triangle Division
● Diamond-Square
● Midpoint Displacement
● Fault Formation
● Particle Decomposition
● Voronoi Diagram
● Perlin Noise

43. Sample1 Sample2 Sample1 * Sample2

44. Tiles and Clusters

45. Decorations

46. Environment effects

47. Fog, sparkles and rays

49. Creative use of decorations

50. Lighting and camera effects

51. Map varieties

57. Conclusion

58. Concerns
● Reaching natural, hand-crafted feel
● Boring on a small scale
● Optimizations
● Too many settings

59. Roadmap improvements
● Adding life to the map with animated decorations
● Path decorations
● Meta-structures
● Sectors

60. Nice to have
● Map history, for example empty rooms with decorative scenes
● “Living” terrain

62. Questions?
Dalius Grazinskis