ChatGPT made me a map generator

Every map in Cell Front was hand-placed until this month. That was fine for testing one fight and useless for anything else — a survival game needs a new battlefield every run, or you're memorising instead of playing.

What the generator has to produce

A map isn't just terrain here. It has to give me a vessel for the bacteria to enter through, tissue walls that block movement, open ground worth defending, and spawn points that are far enough apart to be interesting but close enough to be reachable in the time a wave gives you.

• Tissue walls, placed on their own collision layer so pathfinding respects them.
• An artery gate — the thing you're actually protecting.
• Open corridors wide enough for a macrophage to plug and a swarm to flow around.

The bug that taught me the most

For an evening the generator produced completely empty maps and told me nothing about it. No error, no warning — a condition failed somewhere in the middle and the routine just quietly ran off the end and finished.

Silent failure is worse than a crash. A crash tells you where to look.

The fix was to make the generator loud: log an error and stop immediately whenever it can't satisfy a constraint, instead of carrying on and handing back something empty. Every system I've written since has that same rule.

Next

Maps exist, but they're still flat — every part of one is as good as every other part. Next I want reasons to care about specific ground.