Introduction

Procedural content generators (PCG) are prevalent in roguelike and RPG games. This tutorial series will cover a basic dungeon generator algorithm. As with any algorithm, you can always expand and integrate it in any other game type, be it 2D or 3D projects.

In this tutorial we’ll generate rooms connected by horizontal and vertical corridors on a TileMap. In our first iteration we’ll create rectangular rooms and in the second phase we’ll expand on it to include organic rooms.

Tutorial objectives

You are going to learn:

to use the RandomNumberGenerator class to generate random numbers from uniform distributions
to understand the thought process of creating flexible and expandable algorithms
to take a basic dungeon generator algorithm and expand it with new functionality by adding random organic rooms
bonus: to create libraries with reusable code by understanding what static functions are
bonus: to use custom iterators
bonus: setters and getters
bonus: class inheritance and polymorphism

Notes on Procedural Generation demos project

This chapter is implemented as three related demos in our public Procedural Generation repository. Here are some notes to help you navigate the associated files and folders:

Common: this folder contains the tile set files we’ll use in this lesson.
BasicDungeon/01.Rectangular/Rectangular.tscn: this is the final version of the code after finishing the first lesson of this chapter.
BasicDungeon/02.AndOrganic/AndOrganic.tscn: this is the final version of the next iteration on the code from the second lesson.
BasicDungeon/03.Bonus/Bonus.tscn: implements the final version of this chapter’s code. In this third folder you’ll see that some scripts have different class_name usages. Since we can’t have multiple class_name declarations with the same name, we have appended BasicDungeon to all identifiers in our version. Don’t let this confuse you when you compare codes.

References

This tutorial is based on work from: