[Devblog] PMap modular procedural map creation tool for Unity

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Hi everybody,

I started developing a modular map creation framework for Unity some time ago. I am aiming at the asset store and professional level, no nonsense data creation. Easily extensible. Fully code driven AND UI Component driven (so you can have what you desire most :smile: ). I have set up a devblog over on my site http://visionvortex.de/pmap/pmap-devblog where I am regularly sharing content. But of course I want to share some introductory screenshots right here, right now. And all updates in the future, too.

The framework utilizes agents that I called “walkers”. Those are basically different algorithms creating the map.

Here’s a very small basic map pushed to a tilemap for better visualization. Different seeds for a few different setups. Everything is seeded, by the way.

That’s one of the walkers doing it’s dirty work iteration by iteration. On the right side you can catch a glimpse of the UI components. But as I said, if you don’t like those, you don’t need to use those.

This image shows more variations using different walkers. The first few iterations all feature a Mazer Walker with different parameters. The later ones stamp “Room Snippets” onto the map randomly and connect them. That means you can create rooms in a separate editor and choose some of them to be randomly appearing as stamps. So, yes, you can mix random and authored content.

Below is the data visualizer component in action. It’s a debugger both for the framework Controller and for the Interface that pushes the data to your framework of choice. Also, PMap features multiple layers on both Controller and Interface. The Controller layers can also cross sample for totally insane data shenanigans.

So, if you please, take a look at the devblog http://visionvortex.de/pmap/pmap-devblog and shoot any questions you might have. Feedback of any sort is highly welcome. What do you want to see from a framework like this? How large would your maps need to be?

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I’m a non coding artist so I have no useful input for this really cool looking tool. It really looks like magic to me. :slight_smile:

But since you asked for feedback - an interesting concept came to mind when reading your post.
Wouldn’t it be cool to have some kind of controllable animation-ability for this type of randomization.

I could just see this as being a core back end - animated to change over time - to a very difficult dungeon crawler type game, that changes the map real-time.

There could be some type of player position indicator, so the general location where the player is doesn’t change, but all the area around the player randomizes.
This could lead to some real frustration and/or some real interesting gameplay.

Anyway - just a thought. -

Keep at the interesting magic!

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Actually you could already build something like that with PMap. You just store the visible part of the map, generate a new one and paste the stored part back into the new map. The framework supports this kind of operations :smile:

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