Essays about game development, thinking and books

Dungeon generation — from simple to complex

What we should get.

What we should get.

This is a translation of a post from 2020

This is a step-by-step guide to generating dungeons in Python. If you are not a programmer, you may be interested in reading how to design a dungeon [ru].

I spent a few evenings testing the idea of generating space bases.. The space base didn't work out, but the result looks like a good dungeon. Since I went from simple to complex and didn't use rocket science, I converted the code into a tutorial on generating dungeons in Python.

By the end of this tutorial, we will have a dungeon generator with the following features:

  • The rooms will be connected by corridors.
  • The dungeon will have the shape of a tree. Adding cycles will be elementary, but I'll leave it as homework.
  • The number of rooms, their size, and the "branching level" will be configurable.
  • The dungeon will be placed on a grid and consist of square cells.

The entire code can be found on github.

There won't be any code in the post — all the approaches used can be easily described in words. At least, I think so.

Each development stage has a corresponding tag in the repository, containing the code at the end of the stage.

The aim of this tutorial is not only to teach how to generate dungeons but to demonstrate that seemingly complex tasks can be simple when properly broken down into subtasks.

Read more

Two years of writing RFCs — statistics

The number of RFCs over two years

Slightly more than two years ago, I became a Lead/Engineering Manager for Palta's payment team. I left the company at the end of 2023 for another sabbatical [ru].

It is time to sum up. I will start with my favorite initiative.

From the first month, I promoted the idea of preceding major changes with text documents — RFC — Request for Comments.

In this post, I will analyze two years of applying this practice to share the experience, summarize the results, and have convincing arguments for my next job.

Read more

Simulating public opinion in a game

The demonstration (in Russian) of a technical prototype of manipulating public opinion and explanation of how it works.

I continue participating in World Builders school. For the last month, I've created a technical prototype of game mechanics for manipulating public opinion.

You play as the chief editor of a news agency, who sends journalists on quests and publishes articles based on the results of investigations focusing on themes that you want to promote.

The top video is in Russian, so I'll go through the main points below.

Read more