Help Speeding up my dungeon creation rate

[Verbannon]

I was sitting here trying to make 2 and a half floors for a 50 by 50 square hell knight castle. So I sat listening to the New York Times audio program from Audible. And I finished mapping the rooms and corridors for the first floor. Then I sat up and realized that I had gone through almost two whole episodes of the New York times before I finished that. I haven't put in any furniture, traps, creatures or anything. just randomly rolling up the rooms and corridors has taken me AN HOUR AND A HALF!

Any ideas why its taking me so long and how I could get better?

[OldTrees1]

The easiest thing to optimize is your choice of generation + RNG.


Now, I do smaller dungeons and use less detail, so my generation system might not fit for you but here it is:

I make a drawing of 8 dots(rooms) connected by lines(hallways) going for symmetry but also trying to have the design have meaning that fits the context. Then I decide what size/shape to make each of those rooms based on impulse. By scrapping die rolls, I was able to use a faster RNG(my impulses).

[Verbannon]

My impulses... suck. Like suck hard.

[JAL_1138]

I take the lazy approach and steal basic layouts from published modules (often bits and pieces from several at once), or even them dagnabbed newfangled computer-vidjagames, then tweak and alter said layouts to suit my purposes.

Most castles are ultimately big rectangles with numerous little rectangles of various purposes and construction (or lack of construction, such as the courtyards) inside in fairly logical arrangement. Not a lot of odd twisty passages or confusing corridors, really. Later developments like star forts complicate that quite a bit, but still. A bit of Googling will turn up several simplified, labeled layouts of real-life medieval castles in short order.

[noob]

Use oblige?
Set some parameters on how you want your dungeon to look and then oblige can help you a little.
(I am a fan of procedural generation and I believe oblige is the best at interiors.)
I am not responsible if it does not looks what a sane architect would have done.
But most random generation system have never been made for making something looking like a place for living.

[Verbannon]

Whats a procedural generation?

[noob]

Using a computer who choose random values and create random data looking like what you want.
Here oblige is a random level generator(it can be used for dungeons if you want)
here is the website with it(it is free and if you get doombuilder which is also free you can watch the maps made by oblige)
http://oblige.sourceforge.net/
it gives stuff who looks approximately like that when seen as plans instead of being seen from the inside(it creates 3D stuff but the map is not)
it is a lot square but the developer is trying to make stuff less and less square(I believe there is a little less square in the sixth version)

[Mr. Bitter]

Weird. Your sourceforge link appears to be down.

[noob]

It is possible it is broken but it is the only address of the original website and it seems it works will all the four computer I used(even through I checked back with only one right after your post)
You might just research oblige doom on google.
I checked right now with an old opera and this website does not works with it.
It seems it is not compatible with all the navigators.
Oh I just find out it is just that it stopped working recently I tried again with my latest navigator and it says that it is currently unavailable.
It is pretty annoying.
It seems it is that sourceforge is having problems/is getting updated.

The sourceforge.net website is temporarily in static offline mode.
Only a very limited set of project pages are available until the main website returns to service.

[Nohwl]

random dungeon generator is the way to go. i like this one. http://donjon.bin.sh/d20/dungeon/

[Verbannon]

Thanks I'll give all the suggestions a shot.

[noob]

Sourceforge is again up.
So now you can check Oblige if you want(and only if you want).

[Velaryon]

I was sitting here trying to make 2 and a half floors for a 50 by 50 square hell knight castle. So I sat listening to the New York Times audio program from Audible. And I finished mapping the rooms and corridors for the first floor. Then I sat up and realized that I had gone through almost two whole episodes of the New York times before I finished that. I haven't put in any furniture, traps, creatures or anything. just randomly rolling up the rooms and corridors has taken me AN HOUR AND A HALF!

Any ideas why its taking me so long and how I could get better?

How prone are you to getting distracted? If you're as bad as I am, then you have to be really careful about what you put on in the background when you're trying to do game prep. I can't have a movie, TV, or even a podcast going, or I'm more likely to focus on that than what I'm doing. Maybe you aren't in the same boat, but perhaps try doing it without the NYT audio program on in the background? Just put on some music that won't distract you, and see if that helps.