Procedurally generating game content with the use of L-systems

Abstract

Modern day game projects rely on teams of highly skilled, multidisciplinary teams, which among others consist of story writers and graphic designers. These projects also come with a lot of problems during the development, such as issues relating to the budget, quality of the game and scheduling issues. The work conducted in this project is meant to point out ways that can help alleviate some of the pressure that is put on the shoulders of game developers, by demonstrating the use of Procedural Content Generation (PCG) via L-Systems. PCG is a technique used to generate game content through the means of an algorithm, rather than manually generating this content. Lindenmayer Systems, or L-Systems, were introduced by Aristid Lindenmayer as a method of simulating the growth of multicellular organisms such as plants. Its applications have been extended to other areas, such as that of game content generation, due to the string rewriting nature of L-Systems. The approach chosen for this project was to develop a two-dimensional rogue-like dungeon game that utilizes L-Systems as a framework to generate the level-design of the dungeon in game, creating a main path and a branching path. The main path will end with a boss room, which is the only way to finish the game. However, the branching paths may offer powerups that would benefit the player throughout the game. The rooms in both paths need to be generated in such a way that every room is accessible through at least one other room. The rooms of the main path should be connected to one another, meaning that if the player chooses, he/she can ignore the subpaths that are generated by the algorithm and head straight to the boss room.