A Survey of Procedural Dungeon Generation

Procedural content generation (PCG) is a method of content creation fully or semi-performed by computers. PCG is widely used in game development to generate game content, from Rogue (1998) to No Man's Sky (2016). PCG generates final contents, which are ready to be added to a game, or intermediate contents, which are might work as content sketch to be polished by human designers. In this paper we survey the current state of procedural dungeon generation (PDG) research, a subarea of PCG. We analyzed the works according to the game features they generate, the solution strategy employed and the taxonomy of procedural content generation. Some of the relevant findings of the survey are: (1) PDG for 3D levels has been little explored; (2) few works supported levels with barriers, a game mechanic which blocks, temporarily, the player progression, and; (3) and just a few solutions relied on mixed-initiative approach, where a human design content is combined with a computer generated level.