First Devlog: Explorey Dungeon!

Hello!

This is the first Devlog that I am doing, and I figured I'd try these out mostly for myself to document what I've been trying out and how I've been progressing. Explorey Dungeon is game I have been working on with my friend Sam DeVarti since some time last year - Sam came up with the concept and the art, and I've used it as a chance to level up my Godot skills.

With respect to the design, we really want this to be playable on mobile devices, and while we we haven't necessarily nailed it, I think some decisions we made are ok. I don't really like mobile games which implement touch-screen controllers, so to avoid that we allow you to move the player simply by touching, and then separately cast spells by touching spell scrolls. It works alright on tablets, so feel free to load up the Android APK.

The bigger thing we tried, which was a first for me, was procedurally generated dungeons. We used a cellular automata algorithm, similar to what is described in this fantastic post. There are two things that I found interesting. One was how the quality of the dungeons can change dramatically with fine-tuning of the algorithm parameters - I feel very happy with the parameters/dungeons we ended up with, but it took quite some (fun) experimentation to get here. Another was how special considerations had to be made due to our tileset - e.g. a "single" wall tile cannot be well represented with our tileset, one needs at least two tiles aligned vertically for a wall to make sense.

ChatGPT To Generate Dungeons?

The procedural generation got me thinking - what if we asked ChatGPT to make a dungeon for us? While the game does not do this, I did play around with the idea. Given the system prompt "You are a game designer." and the user prompt "Using ASCII art, draw a dungeon where "x" represents wall tiles and " " represents floor tiles. There must be at least two rooms separated by a single line of floor tiles. The player must be able to traverse all floor tiles." ChatGPT gave the following output:

This might not look super-usable, but with some manual tweaking (which could be reasonably easily coded out), importing this dungeon into Explorey Dungeon produced the following dungeon:

which is, I think, quite reasonable!

Thanks!

Anyways, that's all for now! Explorey Dungeon will continue to evolve a bit into a mid-sized game, we hope, with more enemy types, refined mechanics, more tilesets and dungeon styles, bosses... well, it's good to have the ambitions at least!

Thanks,
Nikola and Sam