BSP DUNGEON GENERATION

PLACEHOLDER COPY. This is the page shape, not the content. The interactive generator demo slots in below “Watch it run” once we build it.

The problem

Random room placement produces dungeons that are unpredictable but not interesting — you get overlapping rooms, dead space, and no sense of a floor plan. I wanted layouts with structure: a dungeon that looks like someone built it and something else moved in.

How binary space partitioning works

1. Start with the full dungeon footprint as one rectangle.
2. Split it — horizontally or vertically — into two child rectangles.
3. Recurse on each child until the partitions are close to the target room size.
4. Carve a room inside each leaf partition, inset by a random margin.
5. Walk back up the tree, connecting sibling partitions with corridors.

The tree is what makes this work. Because siblings are always adjacent in space, connecting them bottom-up guarantees a fully connected dungeon with no pathfinding pass required.

Watch it run

(interactive generator — coming next)

Tuning knobs

Parameter	Effect on the dungeon
Min partition size	Floor on room size; smaller values make warrens, larger make halls
Split ratio range	How lopsided a split can be; near-0.5 gives grid-like regularity
Room inset	Gap between room and partition edge; higher values mean more corridor
Max depth	Total room count, roughly 2^depth

What broke

Where it goes next