Procedural Dungeon Map Prototypes

These are some pictures of previous prototypes of maps, characters, and pieces of game content that I've developed over the last few years working on this part time.

This procedural dungeon prototype was a simple survival-horror game I created to experiment with procedural dungeon building, animation, and lighting. It uses a screen edge flash to show damage, because I find HUDs reduce immersion for me, so I'm trying to design a game that doesn't need artificial depictions of the game status to be fun and fully playable. I'll still provide the option for those that prefer a number though.

My distaste for HUDs started when playing Guild Wars 2 which was such a beautiful game I just wanted to turn off the HUD and immerse myself in the world. I died a lot that way, and even the screen-edge flash was part of the HUD so I couldn't use the screen flash to know when I was dying while turning off the rest of the HUD.

Our goal for procedural generation is to build dungeons in three ways - content specifically created by developers for a specific dungeon and either placed in a particular spot or a randomly selected spot in the dungeon (the latter to improve replayability), content created for any dungeon but specifically arranged for the dungeon in question, and content created for any dungeon and randomly arranged. To focus as directly as possible on the content that is specific to a particular dungeon, procedural arrangement of content gives a balance between our creativity the need to prioritize the focus of our efforts.

As a survival horror-themed game, this prototype took the concept of "dungeon" rather literally. It needs more assets to fill out the dungeon so it feels more lived-in, rather than just lights and dungeon equipment. All of this can be added procedurally using the same system used to add the dungeon furniture in locations that are appropriate to the layout of each dungeon room.

Another prototype based on on earlier version of that procedural dungeon builder is this one, although I hadn't animated the creature in this one. There was only one floor height in this version, and stairs as goals in each level to go up and down to other levels hadn't yet been built.

Both of these procedural dungeons need additional assets added to fill out the dungeon and make it seem like more of a lived-in space, which is a fairly simple process extending the process to drop the lights and torture equipment shown above into the dungeon but with additional art assets.