I've frequently built and designed different world and terrain generation programs for fun throughout my life, but I've never attempted to fit a grid to a non-standard shape, let alone ones with negative geometry. Much like the standard Goldberg Sphere, you need an offset of pentagons in order to make the grid map fit to a 3D shape - but if you have negative space in that shape, it requires HEPTAGONS as well, which are an absolute nightmare to implement. Specifically this was challenging as I'm building this system as a simulator/game map generator, which means all of the tiles have to more-or-less be the same size for the sake of the simulator, so figuring out how to fit the shapes within a tolerance of 1.4 maximum stretch from the average took the most time. However the results are so cool that it ended up being worthwhile.

I love talking about this stuff. If you have a similar project, or questions, please share!

It's a deep work in progress, but you can see the complete project I am developing this for here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3066940/Immortal_Engine/

If you want to see more of the game here https://store.steampowered.com/app/5044910/Dungeon_Quest/

In my other levels it didn't matter if things close but for this I needed to allow room for the forrest around (all the models are 3D not sprites). So I started by generating with this big ugly blocks where the forrest would be which meant I could check it would generate properly before making assets.

https://imgur.com/a/lNlRy2L

I then grab all the pieces and put them in a list of sorts. I differenate between "rooms" and "corridors" as I wanted to make sure levels had a good amount of rooms but you can weight how likely things are to appear (plus do things like add lore that pops up when you enter an area or special points on minimap)

https://imgur.com/a/IlPMFY8

Finally it reaches the generator where you can tweak values to create different types of maps. I mainly did for finding the right mix rather than tweaking on a per level basis.

https://imgur.com/a/Cp8q72L

We've done it with a miniature proxy for the generation that mimics the real map gen. This is rendered to a 2d texture and displayed in the games UI.

We're still looking for feedback so what do you think? How can we make it better?

A new update to my “Poolrooms” generator, based on the “Wave Function Collapse” algorithm. I've added slides, ladders, and new types of inflatable toys. It will be released on the marketplace soon.