Beneath the Burrow is a top-down 2D pixel-art game prototype developed in Godot 4.4.1, focused on procedural content generation. The player controls a fox character, with which they can move around cave dungeons. This limited area is composed of ground and water tiles. The objective is to find the shiny treasure, which randomly spawns on every floor. Sometimes, the map layout does not allow the player to reach it, so the solution is to use the fox's superpower and generate another map.

The core idea is that every time the player enters the cave, the dungeon layout changes while preserving a safe spawn area and valid gameplay constraints. Cave generation is achieved using the Cellular Automata algorithm, while borders are statically generated.

Gameplay

The player can:

Move freely on walkable tiles using WASD and arrow keys;

Zoom the camera in and out using the left and right mouse buttons;

Trigger actions that regenerate the cave:

Power → regenerates the cave by pressing R

Dig → advance with the level by pressing Enter or Space

A shiny marker indicates where the treasure lies. The player has to reach it and then advance with the levels. A label on the UI shows which level the player's currently on.

Credits

Tileset asset: https://schwarnhild.itch.io/basic-caves-and-dungeons-tileset-32x32-pixels

Character sprite: https://elthen.itch.io/2d-pixel-art-fox-sprites

Background music: https://pixabay.com/sound-effects/film-special-effects-waterdrops-cave-echo-soun...

Power actived sound effect: https://pixabay.com/ound-effects/film-special-effects-magical-rock-spell-190273/

Jump/dig sound effect: https://pixabay.com/sound-effects/film-special-effects-cartoon-jump-6462/

Walking sound effect: https://pixabay.com/sound-effects/film-special-effects-sand-walk-106366/

Sleeping sound effect: https://pixabay.com/sound-effects/nature-dog-sleeping-1-68344/

Transition screen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Shj_QVwrefY

CA algorithm inspiration:

More information