A key aspect of Lament, as a roguelite game, is the procedural room generation; it is what allows the game to be replayed over and over again while feeling fresh and interesting. This page will be a documentation of my development of the procedural room generation in Lament.
What is Procedural Room Generation?
In a roguelite game where you’re exploring different rooms within a ‘dungeon’, each time you play, the layout of those rooms is different. Instead of a designer creating the layout of the dungeon manually, the game uses a set of rules or instructions (an algorithm) to build the dungeon for you. These rules decide things like what room comes after the other, what the interior of the room looks like and even where the boss is located.
The idea is to make the game world feel fresh and unique each time you play it. So, instead of always seeing the exact same layout of rooms, procedural generation ensures that each playthrough feels like a new adventure. Games that use procedural generation often offer nearly endless variety because of how the rooms or levels are created on the fly.