atomic monster

So my recent exploration of tackling my personal game projects in a different way has been paying off massive ways.  I have been far more productive and creative.  With that comes excitement for the project and even more excitement to show people the game because it is a constant state of completion.  I was digging around the internet more and watching programming talks and reading papers on software creation when I came across one that I had heard about but never read.  It is a paper called "No Silver Bullet" by Fred Brooks .  It is a wonder paper and I was super excited when I came across this section towards the end because it turns out it is exactly the approach I have been taking and I have been experiencing the same results from a personal and production level. Incremental development --grow, don't build, software. I still remember the jolt I felt in 1958 when I first heard a friend talk about building a program, as opposed to writing one. In a f...

The level generation system in This Is Dungeon  uses a few different ideas to produce the final levels but I'm just going to go over the first right now.  Levels are generated using the Dungeon-Building Algorithm by Mike Anderson .  This algorithm is very simple to implement and gives really good results.  The levels generate very quickly and the player is guaranteed to be able to reach every room of the level. random dungeon no choke point. After playing around with the generated levels in game I started wanting to be able to break the map up into multiple sections.  Since the features are built one at a time from a previously built room I realized I could just tell the generator how many sections I wanted to break the map up into and divide that by the number of rooms it was trying to generate.  The result being the number of rooms that should go into each section.  With that info you just keep track of the rooms already built and when tha...