Organic Level Generation for Gamemaker

This asset gives you some simple scripts to generate a grid of terrain for your players to explore. Unlike a lot of other systems, which create blocky or overly random-looking spaces, this system creates very intentional-looking rooms and passages, resulting in dungeons that feel much less random and arbitrary, and are a good deal more engaging to explore. Take a look at the screenshots to see if it's the kind of thing your project would benefit from.

It works by applying rectangular Wang Tiles with six potential entrances/exits in a herringbone pattern, ensuring that only compatible tiles are placed next to each other. The uneven pattern obfuscates the random nature of the terrain, while the Wang constraints ensure that the dungeon layout is complex and interconnected. As such, this script ensures that you can access any part of the dungeon from any other point, often through multiple routes. As an added bonus, you can freely add multiple sets of tiles to the generator, and it will mix and match in a relatively coherent way - in the demo, a set of organic-looking cave tiles and a set of deliberate, mazelike dunegon tiles have been mixed to create more a more engaging pattern. I think it suggests some kind of fallen underground kingdom, personally.

It's also fast - the 320x180 grids in the demo take a fraction of a second (press SPACE to regenerate them), and it can do 800x800 - as seen in the screenshots - if you give it a little longer.

The basic scripts require no setup beforehand - juist call "generate_grid" - but if you want to add your own custom tiles, the process is a little more complicated, since the tiles are converted to strings pre-runtime. The project includes a tool for outputting these strings from a sprite image that meets certain specification - perhaps one from the excellent open-source library at https://nothings.org/gamedev/herringbone/herringbone_src.html, which formed the basis for the premade tilesets - you will then have to manually copy these strings to the generate_grid script. Should be relatively straightforward!

If you're one of those odd fishes using Gamemaker 1.4 or 2.0, I can't promise anything but the scripts should all be pretty backwards-compatible, although they're only supplied here as a .yymps, so you'll have to do that yourself.