[gus_massa]

> It’s not perfect, though. It tends to produce annoyingly windy passages between rooms.

One possibility is to straight some corridors in a new final step, but I don't know how well this work in the actual mazes. For example, transform:

  -+ +-   ==>  ----- 
   +-+               

and

  |          |
  | +-  ==>  +---
  +-+

[kibwen]

Amusingly, I think this demonstrates one of the problems with classic roguelike dungeon generation: single-tile corridors are rarely very interesting, and usually much less interesting than the rooms they connect.

To cop a quote from the OP itself:

"Fundamentally, games are about making decisions from a set of alternatives."

In a hallway, your alternatives are reduced to moving forward and moving backward. When confronted with enemies, you can choose from at most two to attack (ignoring AOE for a moment, since it's usually also strictly less interesting in narrow corridors, as the article mentions as well).

Instead of passageways, I prefer a technique I've seen in Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup: start with an enormous open level (often in a more interesting shape than a square, such as a randomly-generated blob), and generate enclosed rooms within that level. At the limit, you can recursively partition the entire level until it's a series of small interconnected rooms, doing away with passageways altogether.