[Flawe]

So I'm cursed with the power of not being able to do any graphics for my games. Naturally, because of this and my love for RPGs, I was drawn to roguelike games. I haven't played that many and I'm not one of the old school hardcore roguelike fans but I find them interesting enough to consider making one.

So here I am, sitting in my bed trying to think of some ideas for a roguelike project that could keep me going when I get bored of my other projects. I've always had a hard time making clones, even if it is just to learn new stuff. So I don't want to make another clone of all other roguelikes out there.

And here's what I was thinking. I hate the idea of dieing and not being able to load the game. But the idea of roguelikes is to die, restart and get a completely new game to play. So if you won't die, you won't restart (as many times as you would otherwise, anyway) and you play a plain old rpg instead of a roguelike. BUT, what if...

So lately I've been looking into dynamically loading systems and I've done a few test cases for 2D tile maps and the like. Some of you might have read my other post of a side scroller with this system that I'm currently working on. Well, I thought of applying this idea to a roguelike as well. Imagine giving the player the re-playability of a game, without making him restart and regenerate the world. Right, how would you do this? Well, when the player starts the game, he sees only the terrain he has discovered so far. What if you don't pre-define the world but completely generate the entire world, as the player goes. So when he gets to an unexplored part, you generate a segment beyond that. The world could be virtually infinite.

Of course you would need to have good generators for terrain, cities and even names for items, npcs, etc. I guess missions and quests can also be randomly generated but I bet they would get pretty boring after a while. For this, a simple scripting system could be implemented to assign missions NPCs. These could be provided with later patches for the game and in this way, a unique main story line can be provided and even updated and maintained.

Just some thoughts I've had. Would be interesting to see what people think as I'm quite new to the roguelike genre.

[Hajo]

I like the idea of procedurally generated content much. Often I go with a mix of premade and generated content, though, in the hope that this will overall give better results.

I can tell that it is quite feasible to have a procedurally generated world, at least if you keep things simple as in roguelikes or their bigger cousins Diablo and Diablo II.

Even procedurally generated questlines have been done, but this definitely is a field that needs more research, but I believe that at least two games use that with some success.

That is something I really want to try and make a prototype, I mean some example implementation that only generates questlines and you can "play through" by just defining how each step ends ... I want to do that since a year though, and get nowhere.

[Flawe]

I'm sure with some research one could generated some cool story lines but I doubt very much a main story line can be generated and also be very good and captivating. Nevertheless, it's worth a shot. I mean, if you have a close to infinite random generated world, you will definitely need some generated plots too :P

[valderman]

[Hajo]

I think Gearhead http://www.gearheadrpg.com and Dwarf Fortress use such with some success.

[cowgod]

Your world might have better results if you generated a whole dungeon or area at a time rather than generating each square as it becomes visible.

That might be what you mean anyways. In fact, I suspect that it probably is.

The results of creating a whole dungeon at a time might be a bit more coherent.

I once had some kind of "Adventure Game Creation Kit" or something for the Commodore 64. It was really cool, though the games it created weren't all that great. It created the whole world before you played it, though I think it's only necessary to create a dungeon at a time.

[Flawe]

Yeah, it doesn't make much sense to generate each square by itself. I was thinking of generating even the overworld, not only the dungeons. So in that case you would need to generate large parts of the world so you can create say mountains with a river that transforms into woods and plains, or whatever. But you would generate this in the background and wouldn't reveal it to the player until he explores it all.