Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Design Genres #16: Quasi-3D Dungeon-Delvers

Yeah, yeah, a little late this week. Which is why this post will be immediately followed by a game review, free of charge. Friggin' winter maladies.

What I mean by Quasi-3D Dungeon Delvers is that popular RPG system on home computers in the late 80s/early 90s where you walk around a 3D dungeon in four directions. Though these games usually had the depth of a 3D game (in the literal sense) in that you could see a monster down the corridor moving towards you, it was by all practical metrics a 2D game with sprites instead of polygons. Dungeon Master was probably the first and most prevalent of this genre, seeing how it sold like hotcakes during its original production run in 1987 on the Atari ST (1988 for Amiga). It was followed by other highly acclaimed series like Eye of the Beholder and Captive (a sci-fi variant). A game called Dungeon Hack, which was released some years later in 1993, was the first of this genre to feature Rogue-like randomly-generated dungeons based on an algorithm that the players could edit before starting (such as editing how many floors the dungeon would have, and the overall difficulty of the monsters they would meet).

I have a couple of ideas for making a new instance of this genre that would be sufficiently different from its predecessors to avoid a basic rehash. The first is incorporating Disgaea's Item World system, using a randomly-generated dungeon to represent the inside of that item where you would find additional treasure. This would work by creating a dungeon in the shape of that item. So for a helmet's Item World, it would be a dungeon with a map shaped like a helmet, with each square room on the grid representing a pixel (since most of the graphics in such a game would be presented as pixel-based sprites). Obviously, the more ornate the helmet (like having horns, or an elaborate visor) the more varied the resulting dungeon.

The second idea, and one that I didn't just steal wholesale from another game, is to have a fully 3D map which is represented as a cube. At certain points within the dungeon, you can flip the square rooms on either of its four sides and continue going. While potentially too complex to figure out initially, a decent difficulty curve (Such as starting small, with a 4x4x4 cube) and an imaginative and helpful mapping system (such as only highlighting the 2D plane you're currently on and shading out all those above or below you) should alleviate most of the discomfort. The sheer potential of these cuboid dungeons means that you can boost the exploration factor several times over. I think this system would also make a trippy Escher-esque avatar system for some kind of social networking site, like Habbo. Special cliques could be formed for people who walk on the ceiling, as they stare bemusedly at the newbies milling around above their heads. Well, it's an idea.