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Game Design Game Development Geek / Technical

Exploring Procedurally Generated Dungeons in Unexplored

Joris Dormans, co-author of Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design and game design researcher, is also an indie game developer who focuses on emergent game play and procedural content generation.

While it is not unusual for indie games to use procedural generation, his 2017 game Unexplored leaned on PCG heavily in its marketing as a selling point.

And Boris the Brave wrote a series of articles explaining how it works!

Lock and Key Dungeons focuses on a common level design technique to create a sense of progress and provide challenges to players.

Graph Rewriting for Procedural Level Generation is about a seldom-used yet well-understood technique for generating sophisticated levels.

PhantomGrammar and Ludoscope digs into the custom tools that Dormans uses for graph rewriting and visualization.

Dungeon Generation in Unexplored dives into how Unexplored’s world is generated using the above tools.

It’s one of those “detailed yet leaves me hungry more more details” kind of things.