Dungeon Crawlers

I wrote a while back about game designer Sean Howard's project to come up with 300 game mechanics in 300 days. He gave up on trying to do it in 300 days, but he's still coming up with ideas on a semi-regular basis, and it's time you checked some of them out.

A surprising number of his ideas are adaptable to Roguelike games, and the awesome part is that BYOND is an ideal tool for rapidly bringing ideas like his into reality.

#22 - Tiny Crawl: The basis for a lot of his Roguelike ideas, this is a sort of mini-screensaver that runs an autonomous dungeon crawl you can watch but not so much participate in except for giving hints to the good guy. It's called "tiny" because it takes place in the size of a mini-banner image.

#29 - Tiny Crawl World: Using multiple banners in an overworld, the NPCs have experiences, move from place to place, and go about their quests.

#32 - Tiny Universe: Mechanics for grouping Tiny Crawl World windows together, forming quest parties.

#33 - Tiny Dungeons: A dungeon editor for Tiny Universe. The types of dungeons involved in the game are much easier to visualize here, and this can easily be a project for procedurally generated dungeons.

#37 - PGC Templates: Writing a simple parser could describe an entire dungeon layout for you, allowing for great variety. Or, if you have a map generator already, this concept can be used to fill the rooms with interesting stuff.

#53 - Alphabit Rogue: This describes a very simple way to make monsters' danger factor a bit easier to gauge, while also allowing for some interesting characteristics. It also has ways of simplifying the interface (yay!) and a very cool concept for random items.

#54 - PGC World: Describes a simple way to adapt the concepts of procedural content to create an overworld, connect towns, and even work out how to build in obstacles and puzzles to unlock access to different areas. This can be used to create a small-scale RPG that changes each time you play, or an overworld for a Roguelike that makes it possible to explore more than one dungeon.

#57-#59 - PGC Cards (Part 1, 2, 3): This is a cool way of using a deck of cards to "deal" a dungeon. This set of mechanics is quite close to my heart as I've had an idea in the back of my mind for some time to create a Roguelike CCG.

#60 - Alphabit Kingdoms: Taking the Alphabit Rogue concept, this uses letters A-Z to represent 26 different races or nations, which have different skills, different affiliations, and different relative advatnages to each other.

#70 - Tiny World Cities: Part one of a three-part concept, this goes over the idea of creating a sim-like overworld for autonomous adventurers that go off exploring dungeons for fun and profit, and you get to watch. It makes mention of the game Majesty, a "fantasy kingdom sim" my wife recently discovered quite by accident.

#71 - Tiny World Commander: Part two goes over the AI that will drive your little adventurers. I was surprised to learn this uses a goal stack very similar to the goal stack concept I ended up building into the NPC AI in SotS II.

#72 - Tiny World Encounters: Part three gets into the meat of the dungeons themselves, introducing the idea that you can have multiple dungeons going and earn "DP" to alter their layout. Each one is broken up into screens, and the idea is that you can watch a screen like an aquarium to see the little guys in action.

I just picked out the Roguelike-related ideas here, but there are lots of other good ones on the 300 project page. Hopefully one of them will inspire you to start a new project or take an existing, stalled project in a new direction.