Steel Penny Games

I fixed most of the unsightly bugs and added a few features today, so I guess now it's worth posting a map.  And no, we don't plan on making a rogue-like game.  We needed a quick way to experiment with level sizes for a game without putting a lot of time into an artist building it by hand, so I auto-generate levels at various sizes and we 'play' through it as quickly as we can to get a sense of scale and rapidly find the magical Goldilocks values.  We also need to know if large rooms with lots of cubby holes are more fun than many distinct small rooms, or if many corridors are better than rooms, or if the whole level is better when it's a giant room.  Should be easy to home in on that now.

(Pardon me for using an image, but it seems a lot easier to get upper-ascii codes to show up that way, and not depend on the browser's character encoding to match.  The doorways might be a little hard to see as a result.  Sorry.)

Yes, it looks a lot like Nethack or Rogue--because it's easy to read such maps. But several important distinctions exist... I specifically mark interior floor tiles that will blend into exterior walls that surround all the rooms to theoretically make it easier to skin algorithmically. There are variable width corridors. Also, all corridors are enclosed in exterior walls as well. That helps prevent corridors from touching each other and ruining the linearity of the level flow, plus it the exterior walls form a shell that the player never leaves, which is handy. 

It's certainly been fun writing this. Actually, one of the more fiddly, challenging parts was making the outlines look nice and fit together, as simple as that seems. After several attempts at making special cases to fix bugs with the outlining code, I found a very easy way to select the appropriate kind of symbol (no--I didn't make a 256-entry lookup table, though that did cross my mind).  The eventual solution was very short, and distinctly faster, and simply determined whether each cell wanted to have HALF a 'pipe' piece going up, left, right, and down.  Once I knew what halves were necessary, I just picked the symbol that had those two pieces.  If I were supporting more complex shapes with three or four bars, it could easily be extended to do that as well.