I’ve been spending the last week working on randomly generated levels, for a game I’m making with my brother. I started with an approach where it would make a bunch of rooms, in a grid, and then create paths through the grid to the end, like so.

However, after a lot of thinking and tweaking (and rendering the levels out into an actual tileset (hit M for mini-map)), I decided that wasn’t really what I wanted to go for at all. So, I then spent the next 3 or 4 days reading about how to generate roguelike levels, but couldn’t really find anything I liked, until I stumbled upon this, which actually explains, step by step, how to code a roguelike in Python. I didn’t actually read any of the code, but I used the method he describes there, which generally seemed like it should work for what I was trying to accomplish.

However, it still didn’t seem quite right. I had some cool stuff being generated, but it was really blocky and square looking.

So I decided to try to make the rooms anything but rectangles, to give it a more natural feel. That’s when I found this, which explains a method that worked really well for what I wanted.

Finally, I decided to make it so the individual rooms could overlap, to create this really interesting, natural feeling, underground caverns/dungeons.

My end result is this. I’m pretty pleased with it, generally.
(hit R to create a new map)