Month: July 2019

Dungeon Generation in Enter The Gungeon

| Boris

I’ve been playing a lot of Enter The Gungeon recently. It’s a great, brutally hard, twin stick bullet hell that reminded me a lot of Binding of Isaac. But as I’ve been playing it more and more, I realized that the dungeon design actually shows some subtle genius.

There are many procedural generators out there that produce sensible level layouts that manage pacing and rewards correctly, and there are other generators out there that provide levels that include loops and compact layouts. But it’s hard to find both in a single game. Really, the only other game I’ve heard attempting this is Unexplored.

So, naturally, I broke out the decompiler to reveal all of Gungeon‘s secrets to me. I’ll share with you what I found.

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Dungeon Generation in Diablo 1

| Boris

Diablo 1 is a classic 1996 hack and slash action RPG. It was one of the first popular attempts at bringing roguelikes to the masses, from the niche ascii art. It’s spun a host of sequels, and imitators. It’s known for a dark, moody atmosphere that intensifies as the player descends into the dungeon beneath the town of Tristram. It was one of the first games I played with procedurally generated maps, and it blew me away that generating such convincing areas was even possible.

I recently discovered that thanks to the discovery of various debug symbol files accidentally left lying around, several fans took it upon themselves to reverse-engineer the source code and clean it up into a good guess at what the original game is like. Thus began a week long deep dive into how exactly did lead developer, David Brevik, actually craft these levels. It may have taken away some of the magic of the game, but I learnt lots of techniques I think are applicable to anyone developing a similar game, which I share with you below.

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