Hi

Im doing a topdown 2D-rpg similar to fallout, stalker with a view similar to zelda: a link to the past. At least the maps are tile-based with enterable houses (walls are one tile thick).

You travel on a map and can enter locations: first time you visit a location it is created semi-randomly (the seed is stored so it can be recreated on next visit).

The idea is like this:

A location concists of 4x4 (or whatever) section. Each section is picked from a large collection of handmade section. A section might have none to two houses/rooms and maybe other features. They are then randomly rotated, mirrored (and gets a random look of the walls, floors, cealings as well) and placed in the 4x4 grid. These together form a location.

Would this work? Would the "maps" look boring and unnatural? Any other ideas or examples of how this can be achieved?

Thanks!
Erik

I always felt like half of the success of A Link to the Past was its level design, how everything was finely crafted together. I felt the Binding of Isaac lacked this critical feature and made for a much lesser game as a result.

I think that by creating 'easy replay value', you're also lessening your core value. That's a trade I'm unwilling to make, and from the above question, you seem to be aware of the cost involved.

Yeah but i cannot have premade maps, the game works sort of like a rougelike. So i need to find the least bad solution for generating maps!

Depending on the environment type, arranging pre-made objects of various sizes in a large empty environment might be simpler and/or more effective than matching edge types of Wang tiles (which are subject to combinatorial explosion, usually causing uncanny regular structures due to not supporting a large part of the plausible edge types). For example:

• For a JRPG-style village, start with grass and place entrances around the border and prefab houses in the middle, then build pathways between houses, a fence around the whole village, trees or rocks outside the fence, etc.
• For a city, place horizontal and vertical roads at random positions, then fill each rectangular space between them with a combination of buildings, alleys, empty space, etc. of the appropriate size.
  Irregular slack between buildings can be added to gardens and courtyards and fenced procedurally.
  Adjacent blocks could be merged, removing the intervening road segment, to add variety (very large buildings, parks, squares, etc.) or large blocks could be split into sub-blocks independently, even recursively one road at a time, for a more medieval look.

Good ideas.

I also start to think maybe its better to make premade "houses/rooms/map features" of varying size (lets say from 10x10 tiles to 50x50 tiles) and place these rotated/mirrored freely on the map (200x200 tiles) until map is "full enough" insetad of placing premade mapsections (50x50 tiles) in a rigid 4x4 grid of mapsections.

This would mean a more fluid/natural map (village/base/wilderness) layout i think.

For manmade places especially, it might be worth thinking of the problem in terms of a "place grammar" that describes how places can possibly nest inside each other and a corresponding set of functions that can generate random "sentences" (that is, places) that fit this grammar. This can render both of your ideas compatible, so you can use each when they have the right results.

So for a simple example, suppose you have a plot within a town that's 20 by 30. And you call fillRandomPlot(x,y,20,30) which might randomly choose:

• fillWithFence(x,y,20,30), which places a fence and then calls fillRandomPlot(x+2, x+2, 16, 26) to place something inside the fence
• fillWithYard(x,y,20,30), which makes a nice "front yard" of no more than a third of the plot, and then calls fillRandomPlot on the remaining space.
• splitVertically(x,y,20,30) which splits the area vertically, somewhere roughly in the middle, with just plain grass, and then calls fillRandomPlot on each remaining piece.
• fillWithBuilding(x,y, 20, 30), which draws exterior walls and then starts calling fillRandomRoom...