[BigManJones]

[Mandrake]

Ok, here's what I have after dreaming up some ideas last night. I came up with a very cool concept- I was playing a board game where the rooms (it was a mystery game) were laid out at random before hand. And I thought- that a cool ass way to do things.

The rooms were drawn on cards, and the cards were shuffled and then placed at random to make a mansion. Some room had events in them, so when you landed you had to draw an event and see what happened.

I thought- Huh. What if I did a room by room approach for moving through the dungeans? Then, level designers could create a series of rooms (with rules on some events that might happen in the room), connected to an overall dungean. Then, each time you a started a game for each dungean it would shuffle the room deck for that dungean and layout the levels at random whilst populating the dungean with baddies and treasure.

This seems like a good way of getting it to be random, while each dungean has a unique look and feel and the rooms don't become boring replications of each other.

The other idea I have is a random quest tree. What will happen is that each village will have a cast of characters (NPC's), and the game will have a list of quests involving them, as well as sub plots. It will generate the tree (with main goal, activities to acheive goal, what happens after goal is achieved). The game will also have an overall plot generator as well for an arching plot to fit around the sub plots.

This way, each game will be unique and yet have the story book quality of being scripted as well.
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Xmark

http://pauljessup.com

[Aptyp]

[Mandrake]

[BigManJones]

[Nephilim]

Heh. We must really be working on similar ideas. I used a similar approach to the 'card shuffling' idea you mentioned on a previous roguelike game I wrote.

Basically, the game built levels using pre-designed dungeon layout pieces, similar to the old "Dungeon Geomorphs" that were available for D&D long ago.

Instead of rooms, they were rectangular blocks of corridors, rooms, doors, secret doors, and "features". These were dropped onto a 3x3 grid, rotated and flipped randomly, and connected to each other by way of corridors that connected 'out points' from adjacent geomorph.

They were simple text files with '#' representing walls, and '.' representing corridors, etc. Nothing fancy, but they were pretty effective. I think each grid location was 20x20 or so.

Most geomorphs would take up only 1 grid location, but some were 2x1, some were 2x2, some were 3x1, some were 3x2, increasing in rarity until you get to the unique big endgame level, which was a 3x3.

Then, it would populate the features at the given locations. Each feature location was given a designation, so that some locations were good places to put monsters, some were good places for treasures, some were good places for level exits, some were good for things like magic statues or fountains, and some were good places to put portcullises which had to be raised by levers elsewhere on the level.

The hardest part of the dungeon-generating algorithm was the part about making sure all dungeon rooms were accessible (without just connecting up every cell to every adjacent cell) and that every area that was blocked off with a portcullis could be opened (so the lever could not be placed behind the portcullis, for instance, or the lever for portcullis A behind portcullis B and the lever for portcullis B behind portcullis A). But that work paid off, because it adds some interest to the game to have to hunt around for levers, not knowing whether that lever you just pulled released some deadly monster or opened the way for escape...

Anyway, your card-based idea sounds pretty similar to this.

It would be interesting to let the size of the definable areas vary. That way, you could design a small room, or a large cavern, or a series of rooms.

In fact, I think you should consider basing the entire game engine off of it, not just the dungeon levels - maybe the towns and wilderness areas could benefit from a card-based approach, too. You could always have non-random town areas by having only one card to randomize from, but this sounds like a good model of extensibility.

You'll probably also want a way to force certain cards into certain areas. For instance, when you're randomizing your quests and such, you'll probably want to do things like forcing the predefined unique "monk's crypt" area onto level 5 of the catacombs or something. Then this approach could be used to force things like the starting town's layout, the shops that are available, etc., while letting the outskirts areas be random.

[Rainer Deyke]

Actually I've also been working on a similar idea. My variant is supposed to be a dream world without solid geography, so only a small part of the world (3x3 "cards" of 16x16 tiles each) is active any time. When the player moves from the central "card", the "cards" on one side of the active zone are dropped and new "cards" are selected for the other side.

I'm also planning on using the "card" concept for a different game with no random element; the "cards" would be used as tiles to create the maps in a map editor. Ultima 6 uses this technique.

[Mandrake]

[biggerUniverse]

Damn you! Tempting me with the siren song of writing a Rogue-like! A pox on both your dimensions!
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[Mandrake]

Heh..heh...heh. Why not though? Rogue likes are interesting in different ways than what we usually work on around here (ie: console style story-centric games) and could be an interesting practice in getting a fresh look on how we do things.

Of course, what I'm working can only extremely loosly be called a rogue-like, since it takes very little from the rogue like genre. Just enough to make it something more unique.
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"Well, last time I flicked on a lighter, I'm pretty sure I didn't create a black hole."-
Xmark

http://pauljessup.com

[biggerUniverse]

(sigh) OK! You talked me into it. I'll do what I can... count me in.
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[Mandrake]

Well, right now I'm working on the random map generator. It's pretty simple. Doing it in Lua with Freya. I should probably write up a design doc sometime this week.

What would you want to do?
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"Well, last time I flicked on a lighter, I'm pretty sure I didn't create a black hole."-
Xmark

http://pauljessup.com

[biggerUniverse]

I don't know. Do you have this project as an svn module?
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[Mandrake]

I will when I get home tonight.

EDIT:
All I've got done right now is the basic skelaton for the map generator. Nothing tried yet. It can take in cards (or rather rooms), sort and shuffle them, build a 2d map from them. I need to rewrite some code. I realised after I got home a way to make it more efficient (using index refrences versus full copies). Anyway, later tonight I'll see if Happy can set us up an SVN. I also plan on doing this design doc soon. What OS are you using?
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"Well, last time I flicked on a lighter, I'm pretty sure I didn't create a black hole."-
Xmark

http://pauljessup.com

[biggerUniverse]

The one-and-only Linux. (RH, Slackware)
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