[WIP] Randomly generated dungeons proposal

[Arcanorum]

Category

• Map
• Other

Feature description

Currently there are several problems

• There is too much availability of resources across the overworld. There are only a few special items dropped by bosses, which is the main reason to even go into a dungeon.
• There is a lack of ways to use up crafted items without just dumping them. The current dungeons just aren't long enough (or can be ran through quickly by just killing specific creatures and ignoring everything else) to consume enough of a player's crafted items.
• There is a lack of incentive to pursue higher crafting stat levels. High durability items aren't as valuable as they should be. Having a higher durability item hardly makes a difference to how you approach situations, in particular dungeons, as you can carry a lot of stuff and you probably won't run out of items to use (weapons, armour) so don't even need the extra durability given by being made with a higher crafting stat.
• Dungeons get boring after the optimal strategy for completing it has been found. Large parts can be skipped/cheesed. The predictability in creatures and item spawns makes runs predictable and lacking the excitement of surprise.

Randomly generated dungeon instances could help to solve some of these problems.

Story mode

The current hand-crafted static dungeons would become the "story mode" of the theme of each dungeon, which would be paced to introduce the player to the kind of threats they should expect in the future.
Perhaps this can be expanded with actual narrative features, but this is outside the scope of this issue.
When looking at the interface at a dungeon portal, players would have the option to choose between this story mode, and the new random mode, when creating a party.

Random mode

The layout for the dungeon would be randomly generated by joining together various prebuilt components (rooms), and potentially modifying them in some way (i.e. change how many creatures, what item spawns, what resource nodes, etc.), before adding the party of players for them to find the exit.

Rooms

These would be modular encounters for players that the dungeon would be built up of.
Example list of room types:

• Start: The dungeon starts here, and all other rooms branch out from here.
• Combat: Some creatures to fight with a locked door. One of the creatures has the key.
• Environmental: Some kind of environmental obstacle, like projectile emitters and/or ground hazards.
• Loot: A locked room with a random selection of pickup items in it.
• Resource: A random selection of resource nodes that can be gathered from. They would not regenerate once gathered.
• Crafting: A random selection of crafting stations to use.
• Shop: A random merchant NPC in a shop to buy items from.
• Boss: A room with a boss in it. There would be at least one of these in every floor (there may be more), that drop the key to open the exit room.
• Exit: A locked room with a portal in it to the next floor.

Floors

The random dungeons would be potentially endless. The dungeon can be extended by reaching the exit portal, after which a new dungeon would be generated for the party to move on to, to continue their run.

How far they can get will be determined by their starting gear (makes taking in high durability items more important) and what resources they can find that are provided by the dungeon as they explore.

Dungeons would become safe to exit (leaving the game won't be treated as a death when in a dungeon (expect for while in combat)) and a button would be added to the GUI to leave the dungeon without having to refresh the page.

When one player reaches the exit portal of a floor, they can then start a short timer after while all players in the party should be moved to the next floor. The current timer should also be stopped, to prevent them from running out of time while waiting for the next floor to start.

The party shouldn't be able to get spread out across several floors.

Each time the party enters a new floor, the timer should restart, so they have the same amount of time to finish each floor.

Notes

More like what most true roguelikes (especially old ones) have for their dungeon generation.

[Arcanorum]

Closing as not relevant for Rogueworld.