Path of Exile Talent Competition

Its not much, but i enjoy making pillows, and i think the atlas is a good fit for a pillow.

I have been fascinated by automatic level design in computer games for quite a while now. When Exile Con 2019 included a talk about Path of Exiles level generation process, I was immediately hyped. I watched the talk on YouTube a couple of times (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXnoHTqO7TE) and took a lot of inspiration from it. However, back in the days, I did not find a platform where I could test my own ideas.

In Fall 2020 it occurred to me: Minecraft has been another favorite game of mine for a long time now and people started making Minecraft datapacks for all sorts of things these days – maybe it was my chance to combine my passion for Path of Exiles map system with my passion for Minecraft by implementing custom level generation in Minecraft.

After some attempts I could generate a maze-like structure with some rooms that connect along the edges of a generated graph (The concept of “rooms” was actually directly inspired from the Exile Con talk mentioned before). So with being able to generate caves underground below me or islands in the sky above me, my focus shifted again. The ideas I had were proven possible and all that was left was “details” ;-)

When GGG announced their talent competition, I was hooked. It was the perfect opportunity to bring my previous attempts to a final datapack. To wrap up any individual ideas and put everything together. My goal: make a Minecraft datapack that resembles the Path of Exile map system.

I decided to use the core structure generation process I had implemented previously but convert everything to real Path of Exile maps. So first, I put every generated level into a custom dimension (so it did not interfere with the Minecraft overworld anymore). Then I implemented a portal system which allowed to travel to and from the maps. I added map monsters and a boss encounter with its own room at the end of the map (which meant restructuring the level generation itself since the levels were generated from the center back then). I stored the level generation parameters into map items which could be placed in a map device I built. The map device read the parameters from the map items and generated levels accordingly. Then I added a new map theme to my previous two themes and extended everything in terms of rooms to offer more variety and diversity. And finally, after more all-nighters than I should have put in, I used the last weekend of the competition and produced my video about the datapack.

So there you have it: A video showing my custom Minecraft datapack that includes
- a map device and portals to / from the maps
- map items
- three unique map themes
- monsters on the maps
- boss encounters
and which can easily be extended for more content to come.