About
dungeonmaker-js brings a dungeon generator from 2001 to today's browsers and to Node. Two people's work stands behind the generator itself, and one person's behind everything around it.
Where DungeonMaker comes from
DungeonMaker was written by Dr. Peter Henningsen (alifegames) and published as free software under the GPL, with its home at dungeonmaker.sourceforge.net. It does not draw dungeons from a template. It grows them: small autonomous builders walk across the map, crawlers raising walls into labyrinths, tunnelers carving corridors and rooms, spawning offspring generation after generation. A design file sets their genes, and the dungeon emerges from what they do. The design concepts explain the details.
Aaron Dalton contributed to the upstream project and prepared release 2.05 in 2005: he merged the changes from a forked project (the generate() method, designs passed as text instead of files, accessors for rooms, monsters and treasure) and moved the project to the GNU build system. Release 2.05 is the last one upstream, and it is the version this port is built on.
The upstream sources, the manual and the eleven sample designs are part of this repository, byte-identical to the 2.05 release tarball, in native/vendor/dungeonmaker-2.05. The few changes the port needs live next to them as small, documented patches.
Who carries it on
The WebAssembly port, the npm package, the command line tool and this site are created and maintained by spearwolf.
I continued DungeonMaker because I enjoy generating dungeons and mazes, and I enjoy JavaScript, and this generator sits right where the two meet. Upstream has been quiet since 2005, and it seemed a shame to leave such a generator lying around orphaned. So I first ported it to the browser in 2014, compiled to asm.js with Emscripten (still preserved at the git tag legacy-2014). In 2026 I turned that experiment into a proper package: a WebAssembly core that produces the same dungeon for the same design and seed on every platform, a Web Worker client, JSON designs with a schema, render and export helpers, a CLI, and the playground and editor on this site.
This is an unofficial port: it is not endorsed by or affiliated with the upstream author. Issues and ideas are welcome at github.com/spearwolf/dungeonmaker.js.
License
DungeonMaker 2.05 is © 2001 Dr. Peter Henningsen. The port, the package and this site are by spearwolf. All of it is released under the GPL-3.0-or-later; the license page explains what that means for you.