Joris Dormans - Cyclic Dungeon Generation

I’ve mentioned cyclic generation before, and here’s a talk by Joris Dormans about how they’re using it in Unexplored.

The other thing I want to highlight here is that the generator is deliberately creating invisible, intangible structures: in many level generators, there isn’t any explicit structure at the level where you would get deliberate loops.

By having the generator explicitly lay out patterns that are at a deeper level than the basic physical geometry, it creates order.

The mention of transformational grammars is also interesting: again, it’s a higher-order structure to represent information about the thing being generated. Moreover, it’s a structure that inherently encourages operations to be enacted to change that structure or to embed additional information.

I like comparing it to how functional programming allows higher-order operations to be applied abstractly to collections of functions, but that’s a bit esoteric as an introductory analogy.

The thing I’m trying to get at here is that being able to manipulate the invisible structures that describe relationships between elements is much more powerful than trying to generate the individual elements separately. Instead of moving each joint on the puppet individually, you pull a string that controls the entire limb.

Anyway, there’s a lot to process in the talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mA6PacEZX9M