some of the vertical shafts have dramatic gangplanks in them (which, i think, might sometimes have ladders at the end?).

well

pit

i was busy with pleasant social things for a few days but i'm excited to get back to art projects. the general trajectory right now is i want to get these vertically connected levels working, then add foliage and weathering. then i want to do some long arc skills and items work!

octavia and i are sitting down to play poschengband.

My tiny star system generator ASTRA SPLENDENS is now available for exploration: itch: verbante.itch.io/astra lexaloffle: www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=153... #pico8 #procgen #gamedev

we welcome to the public domain today Betty Boop in "Dizzy Dishes", but specifically only weird dog Betty Boop

i'm trying a connector variant which does random detours in the middle. it generally leads to more weblike, less parallel passages (because they stop early at existing passages) and also makes dead ends sometimes.

i have a dangerous and repeated urge to explore these in first person, which is truly not going to be sated if i don't make it into a horrible overdetailed daggerfall thing. but for the time being, it's just a pipe dream.

three runs of the WIP vertical connection generator. the large square ∷ rooms are light wells which extend all the way to the surface. the 3u □ rooms are wells.

playing with parity rules + parameterizing a few things, like room overlap (1, here) so rooms feel more related and can combine into composites harmoniously.

nested rooms

i added wells to the generator. these thread through the entire stack of floors, so you could, if appropriately equipped, use these for vertical traversal. or you could just use them to get water.

⬜ 0x2b1c - large white square

playing poschengband. i'm doing a dark elf grey mage. i started out with very little money, so this is going to be rough! i got AC 6 and 14 pebbles (well, and some books...) my plan is magic missile @ level 1, then minor enchant @ level 2 and try to make it back to town in time to get a 3r lamp.

magic system thoughts: it's interesting how heat is a presence and cold is actually not a thing, but the absence of a thing. i wonder how you could design systems on that principle. one example would be having spells which use mana, and spells which use the hole in your mana left when you cast.

Green River Tunnel East, 12/29/2025, 5:39:26 PM

[jointed] dungeon

level generator update so this isn't done yet, but it's far enough along that i can explain a few things! in this game, levels persist and you can travel up and down freely. what i'm working on is a generator (and some techniques) with interesting vertical connections which really lean into this.

level generator update: the refactor is complete. i anticipated needing to make this more complex, but it's actually good like this. i may save off this version and try doing accretion (with barriers) to see how i like the original idea.

level generator update: ok, the refactor is mostly there! real world underground cities suggest that perhaps these could have water wells as well as light wells / airshafts. it could be really neat to go back to the same well to get water, in the same place across multiple floors as you descend.

level generator update: refactoring some things. it currently looks like this.

level generator update: this is pretty solid at this point. i have some bookkeeping work to do now, so i can do accretion properly (though as is often the case, doing it the naive way actually has some benefits)

some steps toward "locally formal" alignment. (it's tricky because i'm doing 2u major connectors, but i want to use parity within each odd-width block the same way. i suppose i could try absolute, that might be neat.

this map showcases an interesting and deliberate thing about this vertical connection approach. see the upper left here, which is connected to stairs but /not/ the rest of the level? that's allowed. it requires travel to another floor for access.

ok there are still many things to do, but it's "working" in that the fixed elements like stairs, air shafts etc. which will be the same across floors are knit into the algorithm, and everything is connected! i am starting to get a feel for this algorithm and i think it will be good.

ok i'm going to stop to eat, but i started in on some bookkeeping (which will be used for accretion) and i did a first pass on making room alignment "locally formal", which will help with keeping things structured.

WIP adding rooms around the fixed elements and connecting them in

the bulk of the rooms will be something like this (a previous gridded room generator). you can get them to feel very related, allow overlaps, etc. while still having the generator work in the classic fashion.

next we're going to accrete rooms onto fixed elements, and sprinkle in some which aren't neighboring anything, and connect. this part will be like the gridded rooms in rogue, but this large scale structure will make it feel very different.

optionally enlarging the fixed exits + entrances (smaller rooms with one red X in them). this is neat because you can tweak their shape while still matching the floor above / below which they are connected too.

i may go in and add special cases, refine it, etc. later, but that's good for large scale structure for now! time to generate rooms around the fixed elements.

before adding rooms, i'm generating both some barriers (for blocking in major regions of the map) and major connectors.

now that u have this working, the plan is i am going to add some major hallways and barriers which will lend structure before rooms are added.

WIP deterministic light wells and stairs

Island Burner is a toy that I made at Orcajam on Vancouver Island in 2013! It uses Conway's Game of Life to grow (or delete) and island and come up with interesting-looking Geography. www.greyaliengames.com/flash/island...

i'm going to have to write an addendum to my year's horror movie recs because i've happened upon so many that i really like recently.

i'll probably have something coherent to say about this later but i'm currently speechless and crying a little bit. what a good horror movie. cure (1997) is really something special.

these are neat but i don't remember how they work At All.

hmm what if you had an rpg but instead of numbers going up, you just had various local pockets of the world with different viable builds in them and regional skills / items. shepherd's tone instead of ramp.

oh. i just had a good idea for a story / interactive generative work. weird how doing generative work creates ideas, sometimes.

today's level generation thread: i've done some conceptual work and i'm about to write code. the heart of what i'm doing today is fixed, interfloor structures (light wells, etc.) and postprocessing. there were a few different paradigms that could work in.

crash, part way through generating a level

i don't currently have support for this, but it would be so neat to be able to see between "floors" in a structure, eg having a landing which runs around a banquet hall, or a bridge over a canal.

this is the entire AI bubble and the mocap actor is venture capital

today i'm trying a new class in poschengband- the magic eater. it seems interesting so far. you don't get to use books. instead, you consume the magic in items with charges, like wands, staves, and rods. it then becomes part of your body. you have finite charges, which you regain when you rest.

i have a few tentative new species for my game floating around in my head. (1) a people who are golems. long ago they escaped their masters, and now they make themselves. (2) a people vaguely like more elongated dogs or wolves. hexapodal, with long necks. (3) a hand-shaped acephalic species.

today i am doing a new level generator! it will almost certainly end up as a finished generator but i'm going in with a very experimental energy. i'm doing some vegetation, water, + neat interfloor features. and i want to figure a few things for modularity + reuse across generators.

working my way through NG+. i mostly do lightweight but i have been building mid-lightweight reverses with much higher max EN load (coral or VP-20C)

one of my favorite things in older Angband versions is that the spellbooks have illegible entries in them. oh how interesting! angband 3.0.0 has illegible entries in the first book, but in /different places/.