Cave generation with cellular automata By: Virindh Borra

Often times, in video games, we need to generate levels “on the fly Often times, in video games, we need to generate levels “on the fly.” For certain types of games, creating a random level that is both traversable by characters and is randomly created is hard. However, we can use cellular automata (a grid of cells, each “active” or “inactive” that behave according to certain rules) to create our desired level. In our particular implementation, we start with a random world with randomly placed active cells. Then, on each application of the rule, we count a particular cell’s neighbors that are active. If this number meets a certain threshold, we keep the cell active, otherwise, we make it inactive. We apply this rule repeatedly until the world converges and further application of the rule won’t make any changes to the world.