Wednesday, April 28, 2010

No Origami Dungeons


In thinking about generating dungeons randomly I want a few things from the technique:
  1. It needs to randomize & do work for me-- not just be building blocks I move around
  2. It needs to use common everyday stuff
  3. It needs to be simple
These are all really corollaries of the idea that it has to do something and not be such a hassle that I would just be better off designing the dungeon myself. Pretty obvious I guess.

I thought origami might be really interesting because it has 2 and 3 down cold. But as far as I could figure, it falls down on one.

What I did was take a single sheet of paper and folded it various ways. The easiest fold is just to fold the paper in half. If you do that ~6 times you have a nice grid of squares on your paper. Congratulations, I re-invented graph paper, except it was all crinkly.


You could do 45 degree folds to try to get diagonal corridors or passages but it quickly seemed like too much trouble for the effort.

I still like the simplicity of folded paper. I think you could probably make a solo map with flaps that are unfolded to reveal portions of a map, or something like that. But as far as generating dungeons I'm drawing a blank.

So, I give up here. If you've got any ideas for using paper folding to generate maps let us know in the comments.

Next, I'll regale you with adventures in mapping with stencils.

3 comments:

  1. I've had some success repurposing crossword puzzles.

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  2. @Grim: That sounds awesome. Have you posted about the logistics? I've seen Greywulf on Sudoku Dungeons, but I'm thinking a crossword might be more to my taste because they're more labyrinthine.

    @Roger: that's sort of what my condiment technique looks like-- but it's sort of messy :)

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