Free ASCII vault / prefab maps

[Zorbus]

Here's a free collection of over 1000 ASCII vault / prefab maps that I've drawn to my game Zorbus.

http://www.zorbus.net/bts/zorbus_vaults.zip

Here's a dungeon gallery to preview some of them in use.

I've drawn them with a custom editor but these are just plain '#' and '.' symbols.

Feel free to use.

[DavidMedley]

I'd like more information on this editor.

[Zorbus]

The editor is for own use only. I needed something which could draw basic shapes easily, mark possible exits and zones to vaults and so on.

If you need an ASCII editor then REXPaint might be of use:
https://www.gridsagegames.com/rexpaint/

The vaults in the zip-file are just plain ASCII.

[tangar]

Zorbus, thanks for sharing! Did you write your editor from scratch? In which language? I suppose editor itself could be even more interesting (in terms of discission there - from development point of view, as it's 'dev' section of forum) than vaults itself (but of course it's great that you made them!), so please could you tell the story about it Btw it would be interesting to see some info about your development process of Zorbus - which technologies you use, which lifehacks you understood over working under your project etc

Another good editor is Tiled - https://www.mapeditor.org/ . I use it to create locations. There is a tool made by Ilius TiledToAngbandExport ( https://github.com/ilius33/TiledToAngbandExport/ ) which help me to convert Tiled to my map format (which is basically *band format, with enhanced layer system made by Powerwyrm)

[DavidMedley]

"please could you tell the story about it"

+1

[Zorbus]

The game and the editor is written in pascal. I use an ancient version of Delphi to code. I don't really know other languages but at least Delphi makes writing GUI tools like the editor very easy.

The editor has freehand / line / rectangle / circle / ellipse / floodfill drawing options and cut / copy / paste / rotate so very basic stuff. As seen on the screenshot, you can set marks to the map (white arrows on blue background) where you want new areas to be created. The red rectangle on one of the arrows is where the vault is created. Green areas are zones where content is placed. One layer is for furniture. The checkboxes are for grouping vaults to throne rooms, prisons etc. and setting some options. Vaults are rotated to the right direction when generated in the game.

Here's an example of a prison vault with 8 cell zones.
http://www.zorbus.net/tmp/prison.png

Vaults are just map templates, the content is described in a text file. This way you don't always have the same stuff in same vaults. A content could set a random monster to each of the cells in the above prison vault.

The biggest hurdle in making the game probably was the lack of a clear goal of what kind of game to make. At some point I probably wanted to make the greatest roguelike ever, randomly created open-world with cities, dungeons etc. but this wasn't really going anywhere. After that I narrowed the design to the traditional, one dungeon only -style but only after coming up with the endgame plan things started to really progress.

What really helped the dungeon generator was to have a separate tool where you can run the generator step-by-step, placing one area after another. Seeds are also handy for fixing bugs.

Dungeon generated step-by-step:
http://www.zorbus.net/bts/d02.png

The green dots are marks where new areas will be placed, like in the vault editor screenshot.

More behind-the-scenes stuff, screenshots of debugging tools etc. here:
http://www.zorbus.net/bts/

[DavidMedley]

Very interesting stuff, Zorbus! I expect to try your game after I finish one Human Paladin run for the current competition.

Any idea on how many hours you logged creating Zorbus?

[Gwarl]

I started an ascii editor http://angband.live/textdoodle.html

Left idling in the proof of concept stage. Press a key to start drawring with it, click or drag to edit a character.

I would have liked to do all this:

freehand / line / rectangle / circle / ellipse / floodfill drawing options and cut / copy / paste / rotate

Plus load/save (upload/download)

REXpaint doesn't like to handle 198x66 maps, I'd not heard of tangar's things yet though.

[Zorbus]

Originally Posted by DavidMedley

Any idea on how many hours you logged creating Zorbus?

Hard to say. I started it many years ago but had many over 6 month breaks without even thinking about it. The lack of a clear goal resulted in time spent with world, town and quest generators that were later removed.

It has been a huge time sink and I'm not entirely sure if it was worth it but I'm glad that I got something released.

[debo]

Originally Posted by Zorbus

Here's a free collection of over 1000 ASCII vault / prefab maps that I've drawn to my game Zorbus.

http://www.zorbus.net/bts/zorbus_vaults.zip

Here's a dungeon gallery to preview some of them in use.

I've drawn them with a custom editor but these are just plain '#' and '.' symbols.

Feel free to use.

These are really beautiful!