Resources for procedural generation of 2d platformer terrain

[Nsmurf]

Hello,

Ive been intrested in procedural generation for a while now, but I've finally started to make a game around it, and I've figured out that I have *no* idea how to make a procedural platformer. Does anyone have some resources that I would help? I know I saw a gamasutra article (http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1 ... dural_.php) about it awhile back, but if anyone has anything else, i'd love to see it! I'm specificly intrested in more relistic, rather than arcade style levels, but anything about proceduraly generating platformers would be awesome!

Thanks,

Nsmurf.

[laice]

I'm more familiar with procedural generation of top-down levels, but I figured I'd share what I know and some of it may be useful to you.

There are probably more methods to doing PG but there are two popular styles I've read about - cellular automata and dividing levels into sectors.

Cellular automata is done by creating a random grid of floors and walls, then iterating over each member of the grid multiple times and changing them between floor and wall depending on what is surrounding. More than 5 walls around a floor turns the floor into a wall, for example.

http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment. ... ike_Levels is a good article and helped me get started with PG. You could probably use a similar algorithm with special handling for reconciling potential impossible jumps.

The second method, dividing levels into sectors, involves picking an amount of areas to divide your levels into and then for each area either generating random terrain or randomly choosing between sections of pre-designed terrain. Then you generate walkable areas connecting entrances and exits of each terrain. I haven't used this method as much and am not as knowledgeable, but that is the gist.

Perlin noise and similar variants of the algorithm can also be used to create realistic random terrain and may be worth researching. Also, you might want to see if you can find a dev blog on Spelunky, Tower Climb or Terraria, all are 2d procedurally generated platformers. Looking for info on making roguelikes may be useful too as the entire genre is based around procedural generation. Hope this helps.

[Nsmurf]

Thanks for all of the useful info. The rouglikedevelopment article looks good, and that B5/S4 seems to work well for caves. I'll probably do a combination of both styles, generating terrain in chunks and stitching it together.

Thanks a lot!