astray
A Lua library for procedural generation of mazes, rooms, and dungeons for roguelikes and dungeon crawlers.
What is astray?
Astray is a Lua library for procedural generation of mazes, rooms, and dungeons. It provides a flexible system for creating diverse layouts suitable for dungeon crawlers, roguelikes, and other games requiring procedural map generation. The library solves the problem of manually designing game levels by offering configurable algorithms that generate unique dungeons each time.
Game developers working on roguelikes, dungeon crawlers, or any Lua-based game that requires procedural map generation. It's particularly useful for indie developers and hobbyists creating 2D tile-based games.
Developers choose Astray for its fine-grained control over dungeon characteristics, simple Lua integration, and customizable ASCII output. Its modified depth-first search algorithm produces organic-feeling dungeons with configurable room placement and corridor behavior.
Overview
Astray is a lua based maze, room and dungeon generation library for dungeon crawlers and rougelike video games
Use Cases
Best For
- Generating procedural dungeons for roguelike games
- Creating maze layouts for dungeon crawler adventures
- Prototyping level designs with customizable parameters
- Integrating procedural generation into Lua-based game engines
- Producing ASCII map outputs for text-based or terminal games
- Experimenting with dungeon generation algorithms in Lua projects
Not Ideal For
- Games requiring real-time generation of massive, seamless open worlds
- Projects needing integrated graphical tilemaps without manual ASCII conversion
- Teams using game engines like Unity or Unreal that lack native Lua support
- Developers seeking a visual, drag-and-drop dungeon editor with WYSIWYG feedback
Pros & Cons
Pros
Offers fine-tuning via mods for corridor winding, sparseness, dead ends, and room properties, enabling diverse dungeon feels as shown in the configurable ranges.
Generates maps with user-definable symbols for walls, doors, and spaces through the symbols table, ideal for text-based or terminal games.
Simple constructor with Astray:new() and methods like Generate() and CellToTiles() make integration quick, per the clear quick start example.
Uses modified depth-first search to create natural-looking mazes and rooms, avoiding rigid grid patterns in the sample output.
Cons
Input dimensions are halved and produce uneven maps (e.g., 39x39 from 40x40), which can be unintuitive and complicate level design.
Outputs only ASCII representations, requiring additional rendering logic for graphical games, as admitted in the customization section.
Modifiers like changeDirectionMod (1-30) lack detailed documentation on how values affect generation, leading to trial-and-error tuning.
Frequently Asked Questions
Related Projects
lumeLua functions geared towards gamedev
Simple Tiled ImplementationTiled library for LÖVE
knifeA collection of useful micro-modules for Lua.
batteriesReusable dependencies for games made with lua (especially with love)
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