In essence, what I'm looking for is a procedural 2D tilemap continuously generated in a fashion like Minecraft - which is to say generated as the player approaches the edges of the already explored parts of the map. Map is going to be for a topdown 2D-shooter and the purpose of the map is mostly just for background and determining types of enemies and loot to spawn, so it really doesn't need to be very complex.
I've already researched some into the topic, but most of the answers have honestly been a bit too complicated or seemingly made for pregenerated maps. Voronoi Diagrams and Simplex Noise, while impressive, I don't really understand how to implement in a continuous fashion in realtime. Or at all, really.
What I'm imagining with the generator would be to create simple biomes, composed of two values determining its 'artificiality' (i.e. how man-made the biome is) and 'life' (which is how populated it is). An example would be a city, with high values of life and artificiality both. The values for each would be skewed towards that of its neighbour to ensure that you don't have completely random values. It'd probably be a good idea to ensure that a 'biome' doesn't get too large too, by limiting the amount of tiles?
My question is, are there any better or simpler algorithms to use for something like this beyond Voronoi and Simplex? The game is programmed in C#, I feel I should mention.