[Game] Dungeontest (very WIP)

[Ferk]

So, even though this is far from ready, after realizing that the name was almost taken (check out this related mod) I decided I should rather announce it already.

Be warned that the gameplay is probably very unbalanced at this point and not as exciting as it could.

## What's it about? ##

The whole underground is an unlimited maze composed of dungeon rooms with random content. Even if random, the rooms are actually picked from a pool of hand-crafted sets for each possible combination of doors. This way it's possible to carefully design dungeon sections and add some interesting puzzles or at least some nicely decorated areas (admittedly, the current set is not very good yet).

The dungeon is divided in levels. You will find a dungeon entrance very close to spawn (at around 8,?,8) that will lead you down to the first level of the dungeon. You can find ladders that can lead you further down. Enemies will become stronger the lower you go and chests will have better rewards.

The idea is that people would be able to contribute their own pieces of dungeon and hopefully we would have a diverse and nice-looking set that would give enough variety and make the dungeon more random on each play-through.

You should play this in survival mode. Only when you want to design dungeon rooms should you use creative. Note that enabling creative will disable some things (like the mob-spawning pentagrams), and change the way some other things behave to make them more "editable" (like the bones node).

## Download ##

Download (zip file): https://github.com/Ferk/Dungeontest/archive/master.zip
Source code (github): https://github.com/Ferk/Dungeontest

## Included mods ##

I'm not sure if I'm gonna be able to keep this list up to date (it's best to just check it in github). I hope I'm not missing anything (I probably am).

• Most of standard minetest_game, with some modifications
• dungeon decor: modpack that includes the castle mod, parts of homedecor, and a modified xdecor with some stuff I made
• dungeon_mobs: modpack that includes mobs_redo, slimes, ghosts and the logic for the mob-spawners
• 3darmor
• hudbars
• hbhunger
• mana (still not making proper use of it, but planned)
• playereffects (same)
• unified inventory (I'm pending to change some things here, I want the player to have only a 2x2 crafting grid)

Oh! and the dungeon doors texture is from mydoors by Don (I plan to use also the hidden door idea ;)

## Some screenshots ##

This is how the dungeon maze looks like (well, to a cheater...)



Whoops! dead end



It's a Mimic!



## Future Plans ##

This is mostly an experiment for now, just to have some fun and learn more about Minetest, as a game this could turn out quite ambitious in scope. It's likely it would never be completely finished. But there are several things I would like to add, among them:

• Some sort of goal or at least some rewarding challenge in the deepest levels of the dungeon.
• Shopkeepers, some forge room and some more "support" type of rooms.
• More puzzles, traps, mechanisms and variability in general.
• Try to make the dungeon less repetitive (probabilistic nodes?)

...any ideas? I'll appreciate any feedback :)

[kaadmy]

Yes, you have player Pixel Dungeon :D

[Ferk]

Yes, you have player Pixel Dungeon :D

Yes, I wanted to pay tribute with the chest texture :P ..I would like to also try and see if I can incorporate elements and ideas from other roguelikes.

[RHR]

This game is great! It's a lot fun exploring the dungeon!

The dungeon entrance wasn't visible, so I had to use noclip to enter the dungeon.
I also got this error:

Your phone or window isn't wide enough to display the code box. If it's a phone, try rotating it to landscape mode.

Code: Select all

ERROR[ServerThread]: LuaEntity name "mobs:stonemonster" not defined

[Ferk]

Thanks RHR!!
I'm not sure why would the entrance not appear, but I've just fixed the "mobs:stone_monster" misnaming, thank you for the hint.

[eduardomezencio]

Actually, to me lots and lots of enrances appeared in regular intervals in all directions, but all of them had ladders leading to nowhere. But this is expected from a wip, obviously.

I like the idea of having a repertoire of rooms that are distributed. This makes it very easy for others to contribute content (rooms) and extend the game. And I like the monster spawners . Reminds me of the old Gauntlet. (btw, some Gauntlet-like spawners would be awesome!)

Let me ask a question: are digging and crafting going to be things in this game?

And two suggestions, one for now and one a little more for the future:

For now, it would be nice fot the player to spawn right in front of the entrance. And for the future, have you thought about making a village surround the dungeon entrance, in a Diablo-like way?

Keep the good work!

[Ferk]

Actually, to me lots and lots of enrances appeared in regular intervals in all directions, but all of them had ladders leading to nowhere. But this is expected from a wip, obviously.

Ok, fixed, thanks!! The entrances were spawning also on the stairs that go down (which don't have an opening for it). So now the entrances should be more far apart (about 10 rooms distance, which is 160 nodes) and correspond properly to an appropriate room behind.

One remaining issue I found is that I think sometimes the entrance spawns exactly on top of a tree or some feature in the terrain and after spawning and destroying it, it'll appear to be floating above the ground.

I like the idea of having a repertoire of rooms that are distributed. This makes it very easy for others to contribute content (rooms) and extend the game. And I like the monster spawners . Reminds me of the old Gauntlet. (btw, some Gauntlet-like spawners would be awesome!)

My idea is to make the spawners more customizable. If a player plays in creative mode he should be able to right click the spawner and change the frequency for spawning and type of mob that it spawns (not yet implemented, though). I do something similar with the chests (when you place a dungeon chest you can type a string that determines its type: "fire", "tnt", "mimic", anything else makes it a normal chest).I was also thinking whether spawners should be destructible, maybe I will do a different kind of spawner that can be destroyed to stop the monsters from comming, but then I guess the room will stop being a challenge the next time another players enters it (though this already happens with chests anyway).

Both chests and spawners are planned to be extended more.

Let me ask a question: are digging and crafting going to be things in this game?

I plan to limit the crafting grid of the player to a 2x2 grid, and I don't plan to include a crafting table at the moment (if I do it should be rare and not breakable/craftable). This means tools are simply not available to be crafted (or anything that requires a 3x3 grid), unless they are added to chests in the dungeon. So this way I also limit mining as well.

I don't want to disable pickaxes completely. Maybe at some point I'll add the possibility of pickaxes in chests and let some rooms have hidden sections or hidden loot that might require mining the right spot. This is the reason why dungeon walls are unbreakable but you still can find stonebrick (only diggable with a pickaxe).

For now, it would be nice fot the player to spawn right in front of the entrance.

I don't have a clear way to know where does the player spawn exactly unless I enforce a particular position on him, but perhaps I should do this.

I didn't do it because I had the impression that the players spawn in the nearby of x=0,z=0 anyway (or so did most of my seeds) so I added the dungeon origin point close to there.. there should be an entrance around x=8,z=8 always. Also, I was hopping that finding an entrance could be part of the exploration and gameplay. I was thinking on adding "checkpoints" to the level ladders (or at least to the entrance) so that players respawn there on death and don't have to find the entrance all over again.

for the future, have you thought about making a village surround the dungeon entrance, in a Diablo-like way?

I thought about villages as well. It would be interesting if you traded or brought them goods and the village was able to grow and develop with the riches that you bring back from the dungeon. But that's a bit too ambitious, I want to concentrate on making the dungeon more fun. Also things like that could be made as separate mods.

[Ferk]

I was thinking on adding "checkpoints" to the level ladders (or at least to the entrance) so that players respawn there on death and don't have to find the entrance all over again.

Ok, I just did that. Behold the altar of Eresh, Goddess of Life and Death.

Pray on her altar on life and she may favor you after death granting you resurrection. You'll respawn on the last altar of Eresh you prayed at.



I'm not sure if the image fits with the theme, but I can change it later on. It's a slightly modified sprite from Solarus.

Right now only this altar is actually functional. I added 2 more (Xom, god of chaos and Trog god of rage) but they don't have any effect when you pray at the moment, it was just for me to test and because they are gods from DCSS that I like and I may find something for them to do.

There's an altar of Eresh on every ladder after you go down a level.. though I should change this to only have it on the first level, it's probably not a good idea to overuse "checkpoints", specially in a roguelike where in theory you should have permadeath....

I did this quite fast and it doesn't save the status on game restart.. so Eresh will forget you if you restart the game for now. I'll add logic for this later, I just wanted to get the basic version out (I spent most of the time tweaking the appearance). This is still expected to be WIP after all.

[eduardomezencio]

This looks cool! By the way, I had never heard of Solarus until right now... seems to be pretty awesome

[Minetestforfun]

Keep up the good work, great ideas and designs :)

Skeletons are maybe welcome is this kind of design ?

Your subgame think me about an old game in a labyrinth, i can't say its name, i don't remember its name anymore :(

[jp]

Improved blood splash - WTFPL.

[Ferk]

Improved blood splash - WTFPL.

That looks nice, thank you!! The new blood has just been added :) ..btw, thank you also for xdecor. I like the way you structured it with the xdecor.register wrapper. And the idea of the itemframe implementation that uses an entity was helpful, I used something similar for the altars (btw the altars are still quite dirty.. but at least now Eresh will remember players after the world is restarted).

In addition to the blood textures I've just added as well a new block: "phantom stonebrick". These stonebricks are actually spectral shadows produced by residual dark forces in the dungeon. They basically look just like a normal stonebrick but they are not physical (not walkable) so it can be used for hidden passages (if in the wall) or falling traps (if in the floor). They are facedir-aware so they can be placed in a different direction if you want so that the players can have a hint at noticing that something might be wrong in that section of the floor over there (sadly not really for walls, since facedir has little effect there).

I've also fixed the "/rotation" chatcommand. I was using the algorithm from worldedit before but it' wasn't very good.. it was performing the rotation in multiple steps and this messed up the layout destroying the rooms most of the time (I guess timing issues with the updates). The new algorithm used in this game doesn't have this problem, so /rotate can be used safely now for changing room orientation when editting (still won't change the facedir of the nodes, though).

[Ferk]

New update!

I finished doing some work on the status effects and finally added scrolls to the dungeon!

I think the scrolls are gonna be the way of registering spells in dungeontest. Maybe I'll introduce other methods to cast spells (rods?), but they will always depend on the scrolls mod, there should always be one scroll per spell, even if the spell is later used in some other form and the scroll is left for just testing. Kind of like how eggs are for mobs.

They are 1 use items. After reading the runic scriptures, releasing the magic embedded in them will make them burn and they'll disappear from your inventory.

Can you guess what scroll icon causes what effect?


Each scroll can be both casted to what you are pointing (by left clicking) or self-casted to yourself (right clicking). Be careful not to right click with a scroll of immolation at hand ;)

The effects however do not yet fully apply to entities other than players. Sadly that's gonna take some more work, but it should be possible, I was already refactoring a lot the playereffects mod beyond recognition (I also use it now for storing static values like the position of the spawnpoint of Eresh, I can currently use it as a generic way for storing all sorts of player-specific data.. but it's also still very WIP, and it might crash when trying to apply an effect to a non-player mob).

Also now finally the wild and unpredictable god of chaos, Xom, will be able to entertain himself with the playthings that dare to pray on his altar.
Altars of Xom now properly generate in place of some of the "dead ends". Praying in an altar of Xom will grant you a random effect every time (might be good or might be bad), and it will always cost a random amount of mana.

A screenshot from Xom (though it was already there before.. just not enabled in normal game):

+ Spoiler

In other news.. the /rotate chatcommand now perfectly rotates the rooms, including the facedir and wallmounted nodes. Much better than worldedit's rotate. Also I added some more rooms, fixed some problem there was with metadata serialization and made some minor changes in old ones.

[rubenwardy]

The problem is that the ladder doesn't connect with the chamber properly:



at a guess, the chamber schematic writes over the ladder.

[Ferk]

The problem is that the ladder doesn't connect with the chamber properly:
at a guess, the chamber schematic writes over the ladder.

Hmm.. that shouldn't be it, the schematic does not contain the outer walls and the ladder created by the entrance should be carving into the outer wall anyway.

I've tried using your seed (5296231701029396598 ....did I miss a number?) and I couldn't reproduce the problem. But it actually shows a completely different bug. The entrance spawns floating on top of a river, way above water level. And worse: the room distribution is not very random for that seed.. there are always clusters or the same room schematic repeated across all the Z axis. I'll fix that ASAP.

EDIT: Ok, I improved the generation of hashes for the room generation, hopefully there would be no more predictable room patterns in certain seeds.

For your problem with the ladder.. I'm not sure why it's not happening for my seeds, but I've changed it maybe it's fixed now, I can't reproduce it.

Is it exactly 1 node or 2 that are preventing the connection? Maybe it has something to do with chunk loading.

Also not sure what to do about the entrance sometimes floating in the air. I'm using the heighmap, how come it gives me such position?

[Wuzzy]

A dungeon-crawler for Minetest? Nice! I have waited for something like this.
Do you have any concrete plans for the game yet or is it just an experiment for you now?

I was already refactoring a lot the playereffects mod beyond recognition

Do you want to say what you changed? Is there any chance your changes are also useful upstream?


Some remarks on Dungeontest:

- Scrolls of irrigation are never used up.
- Scroll of immolation has no image
- Signs have no text
- Many chests can't be opened but aren't traps either
- A few blocks can be taken but if “feels” they shouldn't
- Mobs drop useless (?) items
- You can enable minimap/radar to cheat (it is possible to disable it with the player HUD flags)
- Unified inventory feels very wrong and bloated for this game: You can set the time of day, bags are available but don't seem to be used
- TNT can cause blocks to drop collectalbe blocks


High-level remarks:
- Disable building blocks: Means you must also prevent the player to be able to collect blocks. Easiest way would be to set - the “drop” of each block to empty
- No crafting, please: It doesn't seem it really belongs into this game
- Items which the player won't need should not be collectable
- The dungeon feels very repetive after a while
- I am not sure if the grid-based “dungeon cell” approach is that good. So you have a fixed set of pre-defined rooms. This approach is doomed to be repetitive soon, even with 100 different rooms. As soon as the player has discovered all these pre-defined rooms, it gets repetitive.
- Maybe it would improve the dungeon a bit if you introduce dynamic rooms, that is, rooms for which their structure is dynamically created. I.e. there could be a lava pit room where the “stepping stones” are placed randomly. This could reduce the repetitiveness of the game.
- Throw away unneeded default stuff

Rough room ideas:
- Generally add more “trap” rooms
- Empty room with a large spike pit (pit is directly behind the door, hrhrhr)
- Room with a spike pit and some “stepping stones” to get on the other walls
- More styles for a “gangway” (since it is used often)
- Room/gangway with decorative water or lava rivers
- Themed rooms (featuring other kinds of stone, not only default stone)
- Rare “boss” rooms with 1 strong monster (i.e. big lava slime)

Treasure chests with random loot that would get better the deeper the dungeon level.

Maybe the Treasurer mod can help you here, but make sure whether it fits your needs.

[Ferk]

Thank you Wuzzy for your feedback!
And for your helpful mods :)

This game is very WIP... it's more of a playground than anything usable at the moment. I didn't even intended to release it yet but thought it would be nice to communicate to the forum. Maybe someone finds it nice to wander around it, even if repetitive.

I was already refactoring a lot the playereffects mod beyond recognition

Do you want to say what you changed? Is there any chance your changes are also useful upstream?

My modification of playereffect is not really very stable yet either. But it goes in the direction of wanting to store more things in addition to the effects.

I notice that in minetest, every single time you want to add something to the player state you need to manage your own way to store it on disk to make it persistent. My plan is to use the modified playereffect mod to store everything. Including things like stats, spawnpoints, maybe experience level, or any per-player setting in a centralized place, without having to worry every time about saving it on shutdown or periodic saving to avoid losing data on crashes.

Also, I changed the API to make it more similar to minetest.register_node(name,def), I find it hard to remember the order of the arguments in a function when there are more than 4, so named properties in a table are much more friendly.

Also I would like to apply effects to mobs as well (things like poison, for an obvious example), so it would be not so much about "player-" anymore as well.

But like I said, still very alpha. I don't think it should be merged anywhere at the moment.

- Scrolls of irrigation are never used up.

Thanks. Fixed, it was happening for immolation as well.

- Scroll of immolation has no image.

Probably because I'm at the moment on a Windows machine.. case-sensitivity issue. I'll check it when I can get into my linux machine.
EDIT: I'm in Linux and I still can see the image for the scroll of immolation. :S

- Signs have no text
- Many chests can't be opened but aren't traps either

This was the case of the most earliest version of Dungeontest (lazy room design and worried more with the mapgen).
If you see a sign or a chest without metadata in the current version let me know about it.

But I plan on changing chests to have random content, so the current ones are just placeholder. I will have to redo all the rooms with chests when I add this, so I didn't care to be very imaginative or balanced with their content.

- TNT can cause blocks to drop collectalbe blocks

There's only one place that has TNT and this was fixed also long ago (the chests are tnt immune now), if you can be more specific which block is giving problems tell me.
I don't want to make the whole place completely invulnerable, though.

- A few blocks can be taken but if “feels” they shouldn't

I know. Yesterday I disabled a bunch of things in default from being "oddly_craftable_by_hand".
I'm not doing a lot of playtesting at the moment (basically none) because there's too much to do before I can start balancing the gameplay.

- Mobs drop useless (?) items

Current mobs are quick placeholders, basically unmodified from their respective mods_redo version. I have intention on developing more the mobs, add more and make them more suitable for the dungeon, along with their drops. But that would take some time. I also have to improve the spawners first (I just did some work in that direction this morning).

- You can enable minimap/radar to cheat (it is possible to disable it with the player HUD flags)

Thanks, good to know. Though not sure how much can you cheat with it, it mostly shows just squares.

- Unified inventory feels very wrong and bloated for this game: You can set the time of day, bags are available but don't seem to be used

Yes, I want to change the inventory from normal players (I also want a 2x2 craft grid instead of 3x3), but keep the creative inventory from unified inventory (helps a lot when creating rooms).

- Disable building blocks: Means you must also prevent the player to be able to collect blocks. Easiest way would be to set - the “drop” of each block to empty
- No crafting, please: It doesn't seem it really belongs into this game
- Items which the player won't need should not be collectable

Yes, those are the plans.

- The dungeon feels very repetive after a while
- I am not sure if the grid-based “dungeon cell” approach is that good. So you have a fixed set of pre-defined rooms. This approach is doomed to be repetitive soon, even with 100 different rooms. As soon as the player has discovered all these pre-defined rooms, it gets repetitive.
- Maybe it would improve the dungeon a bit if you introduce dynamic rooms, that is, rooms for which their structure is dynamically created. I.e. there could be a lava pit room where the “stepping stones” are placed randomly. This could reduce the repetitiveness of the game.

The schematic format from minetest actually allows for blocks to have a chance to not be replaced.
I had the intention to use this for more random "stepping stones" and "block maze" kind of rooms.

I still think the "dungeon cell" can work. There are successful roguelikes that follow similar principles. And the idea of people being able to create their own rooms seems very suitable for a building-blocks game like Minetest. The thing is that I need to add more elements that add additional randomness to each room. The chests, for example, should be more random. And for now there's only a handful of rooms of each type. I didn't fully start concentrating on making rooms because there are other things pending to be done.

And there should be some progression when advancing levels. Right now there's no motivation at all to go down the dungeon. This is still very experimental.

- Throw away unneeded default stuff

Not just default... I need to do a lot of cleaning, but at this phase I'm still deciding what do I exactly want to have and what not. For some things, though, I just didn't get around to do it yet.

- Empty room with a large spike pit (pit is directly behind the door, hrhrhr)

I have added a room that follows a similar this principle (enter a room in game and type in the terminal: " /load 1/phantompit " ), it might look like a normal corridor, but just try to walk it

- Themed rooms (featuring other kinds of stone, not only default stone)

I had the intention on making whole themed levels.
Like.. something around level 3, for example, I could make the dungeon change the blocktype used in walls and floors (very easy since there's a replacer option in place_schematic), also a different set of rooms and so.
I might also add some special levels where you actually have to mine your way with a pickaxe. Maybe a goblin city.. a level that resembles some sort of hell. One that feels more like caves.. just like there are dungeon branches in traditional roguelikes.

There are a lot of ideas that I would like to take from roguelikes. Also things like shopkeepers inside the dungeon that you can trade with.

- Rare “boss” rooms with 1 strong monster (i.e. big lava slime)

Planned. But I have to work more on the mobs for that.

Thank you for sharing your room ideas :)
Btw, if you or anyone wants to make some rooms ask me if you guys need help (there are some rought instructions in github) and I'd be more than happy to include them!

[rubenwardy]

I forget the name of the game, but there is a very old 2d platformer game that works on the principal of

• splitting the map into a grid.
• generating a single path from top left to top right.
• then picking rooms to match the path and to make it a maze.
• and then playing random enemies and items and puzzles in rooms to make them more seamless.

It's pretty much the same way you do it, except it's much more about customising rooms. By customising a selected room from a palette, it hides the repetition.

[Ferk]

Looks interesting. Too bad you forgot the name of the game. Is it sort of a puzzle-like zelda or more action-like similar to the binding of Isaac?

What exactly do you mean with customizing? You mean the graphical appearance?

It's also more complex to choose how the level is distributed when it's done per-cell in an infinite level versus per-level in a limited maze. I might consider making the dungeons limited at some point (so there would be an infinite amount of finite dungeons). At the moment I'm concentrating in the room content (items, nodes, mobs, mechanics), not the room themselves. When I have enough stuff I'll start making more use of it and go back to changing the generation of the level, see what I can do to add variability and play test it more to check on the balance.

[eduardomezencio]

Your project seems to be moving fast! I'm impressed

[Ferk]

- Unified inventory feels very wrong and bloated for this game: You can set the time of day, bags are available but don't seem to be used

Yes, I want to change the inventory from normal players (I also want a 2x2 craft grid instead of 3x3), but keep the creative inventory from unified inventory (helps a lot when creating rooms).

Ok, I did just that, it was easier than I expected, unified_inventory is fairly well structured.
But I also find it annoying when the interface is bloated with craftguides.

Now there should be no more craftguides or day/night buttons when you are playing non-creative (they will still show in creative).
Also the craftgrid is now 2x2 and the default page was changed to be the armor instead, since people shouldn't be doing much crafting in here anyway.

Also, I completely removed the bags (not sure why they need to be bundled with unified_inventory.. to me it doesn't look like such useful feature). If I ever add some sort of bag item I probably would change the way it's used anyway.

Checking on the unified_inventory code made me realize that I should probably add an inventory page in creative to make it more comfortable to save, load, reset and rotate rooms.

Your project seems to be moving fast! I'm impressed

Thanks! but I think there's still a long way to go for it to be playable

[Glorfindel]

I forget the name of the game, but there is a very old 2d platformer game that works on the principal of

• splitting the map into a grid.
• generating a single path from top left to top right.
• then picking rooms to match the path and to make it a maze.
• and then playing random enemies and items and puzzles in rooms to make them more seamless.

It's pretty much the same way you do it, except it's much more about customising rooms. By customising a selected room from a palette, it hides the repetition.

Perhaps you are thinking of Nethack?

[Ferk]

Perhaps you are thinking of Nethack?

He said 2d platform, I doubt it was nethack.
Maybe he meant Spelunky (here's an html5 version).

Btw, I found this spelunky level generator.

But I don't like the algorithm because it doesn't produce a complete maze, there's a chance it'll produce sections that are completely sealed off.

The part 2 is more interesting.

It explains the idea of probabilistic tiles (which would be possible using place_schematic, like I mentioned). Then it also has a concept of "obstacle blocks".. not sure how that would work in a game that's not a platformer. But it could in theory be added to dungeontest as well using nodes that spawn smaller schematics inside of the spawned rooms. But not sure how what kind of blocks could there be.

[rubenwardy]

I think Spelunky is it.

[OmniStudent]

I like it very much!

[Dorje]

Is it playable but not finished? Or just unplayable?

[Ferk]

Actually it's playable, but probably very unbalanced. It's perhaps interesting to explore the dungeon, but it won't keep you entertained for hours or anything like that, since there's not much content yet. There are very few interesting rooms and some rooms are basically placeholders.

Maybe someone else can give some opinion on the current status since like I said I didn't playtest it much. And since I'm the one developing I'd probably not be able to tell properly.

Maybe I'll work next on the probabilistic nodes. I'm thinking about adding a tool for DungeonMakers so they can mark nodes to have a chance of not getting placed.

I've also in my list to check Wuzzy's Treasurer mod. Right now the content of the chests is probably quite boring since same rooms have same content.

[celeron55]

I like this!

I mean, it's not without its problems -- You're equally fighting the slimes as you are fighting the laggy engine when it decides to generate new areas in the worst possible situations... but the good parts are worth it.

Just add a lot more room variety and a goal and it already is a game. It might need some form of permadeath to allow it to overally make sense, but it's your call. Then all it needs is boatloads more of polish, on the engine side also. Not visual polish, but all kinds of practical things.

I like the challenge rooms where you can't progress without having a few spare nodes or suitable spells with you. That right there is some true dungeon stuff.

[Ferk]

celeron55, I'm honored to receive you feedback :P ..that's an injection of motivation right there.

Just add a lot more room variety and a goal and it already is a game

Originally, I intended to make the dungeon finite, with a bottom level and some sort of "Amulet of Yendor" type of object. But ever since I decided to make it infinite I'm not sure what kind of goal to add just yet. I mean.. should there actually be a last level? Anyone has ideas?

Maybe a portal room of sorts that only spawns at certain dungeon depth and teleports to a boss area? Then people can decide whether they are ready to enter the portal or continue further down the dungeon to get more and better loot.

It might need some form of permadeath to allow it to overally make sense, but it's your call

Yes, I'm still thinking what exactly to do on death. The first thing I should do is remove the checkpoint altar that currently is in every ladder room. Perhaps losing the inventory in the depths of the dungeon is already good enough punishment on death. But if not I could also make the player bones come to life when you find them so you'd have to fight back against your past ghosts for some extra punishment (I think it would be interesting to see how this plays in multiplayer, since you'd be able to fight the ghosts of other players).

But this would be something to think about only after I'm done with the level design.

Then all it needs is boatloads more of polish, on the engine side also. Not visual polish, but all kinds of practical things.

Agreed. I'm open to ideas. Perhaps some rooms might be ugly right now, but that can be fixed later, I'm more worried about the gameplay at the moment.

The game is designed so that it should be easy to register new altars, new spells, new chest traps, etc.

I like the challenge rooms where you can't progress without having a few spare nodes or suitable spells with you. That right there is some true dungeon stuff.

Glad that someone noticed! I'm considering if I should actually try to implement keys and locked doors/checks or not. After all it would be more interesting to block the path with some obstacle that only certain spell can break.

It would be really cool if I could add some sort of "trigger" nodes that activate some behavior when stepped on. But I'm not sure if there's some efficient way to do this. I don't want to include something like Mesecons that'd probably be too much and the rooms are not big enough for complex mese circuits anyway, but something simpler for simpler stuff (locking/unlocking the exits?) would be cool.

[Dartmouth]

Maybe a portal room of sorts that only spawns at certain dungeon depth and teleports to a boss area? Then people can decide whether they are ready to enter the portal or continue further down the dungeon to get more and better loot.

I like that idea a lot, sounds great.

But if not I could also make the player bones come to life when you find them so you'd have to fight back against your past ghosts for some extra punishment (I think it would be interesting to see how this plays in multiplayer, since you'd be able to fight the ghosts of other players).

DC:SS does this, sometimes you find your ghost in the area where you died.

Glad that someone noticed! I'm considering if I should actually try to implement keys and locked doors/checks or not. After all it would be more interesting to block the path with some obstacle that only certain spell can break.

I would prefer having spells instead of also having to find keys.

It would be really cool if I could add some sort of "trigger" nodes that activate some behavior when stepped on. But I'm not sure if there's some efficient way to do this. I don't want to include something like Mesecons that'd probably be too much and the rooms are not big enough for complex mese circuits anyway, but something simpler for simpler stuff (locking/unlocking the exits?) would be cool.

Yes, that would be really cool. Maybe borrow some code from the mesecons pressure plate or player detector and combine it with code from digilines or pipeworks' teleporting tubes to transmit a signal without circuits.