Simple procedural generation of “dungeon maps”

Basic proof of concept for a “cellular automata” model. No real refinement at this point.

Initial work based on this tutorial.

Installation

This script requires the Pillow package. You can install it with

pip3 install Pillow

Running

It takes the following flags:

• --width x: the width of the map. x must be a positive integer. See below.
• --height x: the height of the map. x must be a positive integer. See below.
• --seed x: the chance a given cell will be generated as “wall”. x must be an integer from 1-99.
• --death x: if a wall cell has fewer than this many wall cells surrounding it, it becomes empty. x must be an integer from 1-8.
• --birth x: if an empty cell has more than this many wall cells surrounding it, it becomes a wall. x must be an integer from 1-8.
• --reps x: the number of smoothing passes to take on the map. x must be a positive integer. Large values can significantly extend runtime.
• --out: save the result to an image in the maps/ directory instead of printing it to the screen.
• --color: uses random complementary colors in the saved image instead of black and white. Does nothing if not used with the --out flag.
• --chunky: makes each cell 2x2 instead of 1x1. Does nothing if not used with the --out flag.

A note on width and height

If you use --out, width and height are in pixels.

If you don’t, height is lines of text, and width is measured in chunks of two characters; “--width 40” will produce a map 80 characters wide. This is because each “wall” cell is represented by a double I character and each “empty” cell is represented by a double space; in the font the developer uses, this makes it so that if a map’s width and height are the same, the map is roughly square.

Chunky cells

Smaller maps blown up to a larger size sometimes look better than larger maps, for some reason. The --chunky flag doubles the size of each cell, which makes the raw output twice as big and slightly more attractive. Use with caution on larger image sizes.