Creating Procedural Medieval Island Maps with Wave Function Collapse Algorithm and WebGPU
By
imadr
An everything bagel for the brain. Substantive, layered, well-seasoned.
Summary
The article describes a technical project creating procedural medieval island maps using 4,100 hex tiles, WebGPU for rendering, and the Wave Function Collapse algorithm with backtracking. The author shares their personal journey from childhood fascination with procedural dungeon generation in AD&D to implementing a modern procedural map generation system that produces unique, seeded, deterministic maps. The project includes a live demo and source code, focusing on the technical implementation challenges and the creative satisfaction of procedural content generation.
Key quotes
· 4 pulledProcedural medieval islands from 4,100 hex tiles, built with WebGPU and a lot of backtracking.
Every map is different. Every map is seeded and deterministic.
I've been obsessed with procedural maps since I was a kid rolling dice on the random dungeon tables in the AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide.
There was something magical about it — you didn't design the dungeon, you discovered it, one room at a time, and the dice decided whether you got a treasure chamber or a dead end full of rats.
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