Procedural Level Generator

How to generate a level you can actually use

Six steps. Judge the shape from the golden path before you judge the tiles.

1. 1

   Pick the generator that matches your game

   Platformer builds a left-to-right run made of sections; dungeon builds a connected set of rooms. They are different algorithms rather than two presets of one, so the choice changes what the sliders mean: sections and hazard density shape a platformer run, while room count and connectivity shape a dungeon floor.

2. 2

   Set the shape before the decoration

   Section count, hazard density and enemy density decide whether the level is a gentle traversal or a meat grinder. Theme — neon, frozen, cave, classic, inferno or monochrome — changes only the palette the canvas draws with, not the layout, so leave it until the structure reads correctly.

3. 3

   Generate, then read the golden path

   Every generation runs a pathfinding pass from spawn to exit and draws the resulting route over the map. That line is the level: if it wanders, the layout is loose; if it is short and straight, the level is thinner than the section count suggests. Toggle the path overlay on and judge the shape before you judge the tiles.

4. 4

   Check traversability and the difficulty rating honestly

   Alongside the path, a simulated player pass walks the level under the same physics assumptions and reports whether it reached the exit, plus a difficulty score and a pacing label — Tight, Flowing or Relaxed. A level that reports as not traversable is still shown rather than silently discarded, because a broken layout is often nearly right and worth editing rather than rerolling.

5. 5

   Reroll with the seed, not the settings

   Layouts come from a seeded generator, and the seed goes into the URL. That means a level you like is a link: send it and the recipient gets the same map, byte for byte. Change the seed to explore, change the settings to steer, and record the seed of anything you might want back.

6. 6

   Export for the engine you actually use

   Tiled TMX with a generated tileset PNG is the most portable route and imports into Unity through SuperTiled2Unity, Godot, and most 2D engines. There are also direct exports: a Godot 4 .tscn scene, Phaser JSON, and a Unity package with a C# importer script. The raw level JSON is there if you are writing your own loader.

How the two generators work

Two different algorithms rather than two presets, and neither is the one most people assume.

The platformer generator builds sections, not noiseintro · ramp · challenge · finale · boss arena

A run is assembled from typed sections in a deliberate order: an intro that teaches, ramps that escalate, challenge sections that test, a finale, and optionally a boss arena. Each section carries its own difficulty, reward budget and enemy budget, so the density you set is distributed across a curve rather than sprinkled uniformly. That is why a generated run has pacing at all — uniform random placement produces levels that feel flat no matter how many hazards you add.

The dungeon generator places typed rooms and connects themstart · combat · treasure · traversal · secret · exit

A dungeon is a graph of rooms with roles, carved into a solid grid and joined by corridors, with room interiors filled from a library of biome chunks. Because rooms are typed before they are placed, the floor has a structure you can reason about — a treasure room off a traversal corridor, a secret behind a combat room — rather than a maze that happens to contain loot.

What it is not: BSP or cellular automata

Two classic techniques come up constantly in searches for this, and neither is what runs here. Binary space partitioning recursively splits a rectangle and puts a room in each leaf, which gives tidy, grid-aligned dungeons with even room distribution. Cellular automata start from random noise and smooth it over several passes, which gives organic cave systems with irregular walls. Both are excellent and neither produces typed rooms or a paced section curve, which is what this generator is built around. If you specifically want cave-like organic walls, cellular automata is the right tool and this is not it.

Seeded, so results are reproducible

Every random decision comes from a seeded generator rather than Math.random, which is what makes a level URL reproducible. It also means a bug in a generated layout is reportable: the seed plus the settings is a complete description of the map, so the same broken level can be regenerated exactly.

Getting the level into your engine

Four export routes, and an honest note on what generated output is good for.

Tiled TMX and a tileset PNG

The most portable option. You get a .tmx map plus a generated tileset image, which Tiled opens directly and most 2D engines can ingest. For Unity this is the SuperTiled2Unity route; for Godot, Tiled import plugins read it; for custom engines, TMX is a documented XML format that is straightforward to parse.

Godot 4 scene

A .tscn scene file you can drop into the project and open as a node tree, plus a GDScript importer for the raw JSON if you would rather build the TileMap at runtime than commit a generated scene. Committing generated scenes is fine for fixed levels; the runtime route is better when you want the generator itself in the shipped game.

Unity and Phaser

Unity exports level JSON alongside a C# importer script that reconstructs the tilemap and places entities, so you are not writing the deserialisation. Phaser exports the JSON shape its tilemap loader expects. Both give you entity positions as data rather than baked geometry, so your own prefabs and sprites stay in charge of what things look like.

It is a starting point, not a shipped level

Generated layouts are strongest as a first pass: they fill the blank page, give you a paced structure and a validated route, and let you iterate on shape quickly. Nearly every shipped 2D game that uses procedural generation either hand-edits the output or constrains the generator heavily. Treat the export as a draft you refine in Tiled or your editor, not as final art.

Where this fits in the pipeline

• Procedural Level Generation Guide

  BSP, cellular automata and Perlin noise explained, with connectivity checks and seeding.

• Godot Autotile & Bitmask Guide

  Generated layouts only look finished once a terrain set renders their edges and corners.

• Bitmask Autotile Generator

  Build the 47-tile set your exported tilemap needs to render seamlessly.

• 2D Game Dev Lab

  Every tool in the pipeline in running order — layout, tiles, collision, sprites, audio, economy.