ABSTRACT
There are many different ways of generating dungeons for roguelike games. The most popular method seems to be drilling out the dungeon from an arbitrary starting point. In this way, tunnels, corridors, and rooms are added to the expanding level. Unexplored is a traditional roguelike in the sense that you traverse the Dungeon of Doom trying to retrieve the Amulet of Yendor and escape the dungeon with it. The gameplay is modeled on top-down Zelda games, including real-time melee combat and lock-and-key puzzles. The idea of using cycles for level generation arose during a research workshop on computational modeling in games, and was inspired by previous research in architecture, urban planning, and hypertext structure. Cycles are also very dominant in handcrafted levels. Graph transformation rules allow Unexplored to implement a number of design patterns. These patterns are common structures found across games. In Unexplored, levels are represented as tilemaps.
