Prandom Level Generator

The Prandom Level Generator is an upcoming game library from Insane2757 that uses procedural generation to produce pseudo-random game levels. It is currently in development and is expected to have a working beta some time in Spring 2008.

Principles

The Prandom Level Generator is meant to minimize size requirements for games. Instead of storing all the data for a given level, the designer need only specify a few key variables and the library will generate something accordingly. To accomplish this, a programmer needs to specify:

• Height of Game Map
• Width of Game Map
• Depth of Game Map (specifying how many floors in a given level)
• Game Seed

The game seed will be the identifier of each map. Each seed will produce a unique level, as would be expected with seeded pseudorandom number generation. As such, the Prandom library will only need to read these variables from a file to create the same game board every time it is called.

Prandom Game

The first application of the Prandom Level Generator will be used in upcoming game tentatively called Prandom. It will be designed as a dungeon crawling game comprised of a mixture of Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past-style exploring in Nethack-styled dungeons. The goal of the game's release will be to have an enjoyable game that is relatively small in size and yet full featured. Work on the actual game will start once the Prandom Level Generator library is fully developed.

The idea for the game is to have the player start in a dungeon and find a path to bosses in search for keys and/or items to ProgresS through barriers to different paths. Play starts when a player is asked what their name is, to find the appropriate save file, and, if they are not in the middle of a quest, where they would like to adventure, which will be used as the game seed. Different random weapons will be found scattered in the dungeon and dropped by enemies. These can further be customized with different elements (which have yet to be finalized). Once a game level is completed, the player is asked where to go next; the player is then transported to a harder dungeon with the player's inventory intact.