I’ve been kicking around the idea of implementing randomly generated maps for a while, but I decided to prioritize other things over it and I didn’t really have a solid plan for doing it anyways.

All of my initial ideas involved randomly placing intersections and then trying to connect them, but I never liked any of those enough to pursue them. A few days ago, I realized that some of the possible maps, the original map included, are basically just loops that cross over themselves. If you let your Pede just go straight at every intersection on these maps, it will traverse every road exactly once and end up back where it started. I figured that I could use this fact to more easily randomly generate levels by simply starting on a random tile, and then randomly laying a path that crosses over itself and eventually closes the loop by connecting to the starting tile. This way I only have to worry about keeping the single path within the bounds of the map, keeping it from crossing itself at bad places, and only have to deal with connecting to a specific point once.

Over the next few days I started prototyping this idea and made a lot of progress. However, after watching the prototype partially generate a few levels, I’m not sure that this approach is my best option. Not only does it completely ignore levels that don’t fit the single loop model, but I’m afraid it may not be able to consistently and quickly produce interesting and balanced levels.

I’ve also realized that, having only made two levels so far, I don’t really know what kinds of levels might be possible, or what the qualities of a good level are. As such, I plan to hand make a bunch more levels before I put any more work into random generation, so that I can get a feel for what makes a level interesting. Then I’ll probably look into template based random generation.

Before any of that though, I think I should spend some more time polishing the existing experience. I plan on adding more higher quality feedback, a semi-interactive tutorial, and some music and sound for the next update.

Thanks for reading and let me know what you think,
Zach