Dynamic Dungeons

Hero Quest

I spent a considerable amount of my youth playing Hero Quest with friends at a table in the basement. It's a kind of board game RPG. I mention it because the dungeon was essentially always the same. You unfolded the game board and, logically, always had the same layout—it was printed on it, after all.

The game master, however, had a book with stories and different settings. The game works as follows:

There's a game master and up to four players. Rooms and corridors are only set up when you enter them. So the players never know what to expect.

All players start in a room and then begin rolling dice, moving, fighting, and so on. The real draw, however, is these different scenarios. Where I could turn right in the previous round, there's now a collapsed passage, and the room with the chest? Suddenly, two skeletons are waiting for me instead of treasure.

The limitations inherent in printed maps have been transformed into a versatile game. Even after completing the rulebook, players could copy a blank template and continue with their ideas.

Diablo and Co.

I must shamefully confess that while the world of D&D, The Dark Eye, has always intrigued me, it never quite won me over as a player. However, one day I stumbled upon the first Diablo demo and have been playing games of this type ever since.

Because I'm also involved in game development and have been working with Godot for years (with a steep learning curve and many restarts), I recently took a look at how Diablo maps (dungeons) are actually created and borrowed a few ideas. Other games surely do it the same.

To keep maps interesting, even after playing the game countless times, there are dynamics at play on two levels. The maps are largely predefined because, given the technical complexity of such games, it simply wouldn't work any other way. There are, however, blank areas on the map. These blank areas are filled in anew each time a game is started. As a player, I'm therefore somewhat familiar with the map, but I still never know 100% what to expect.

A second layer, which I immediately adopted for one of my game experiments, involves groups. A simple example would be chests. Of course, I could precisely define the location of each chest on the map, but Diablo handles it more dynamically.

Groups are defined. So, there's a chest group. Instead of placing individual chests on the map, these groups are placed. When the map is opened, the group placeholder is then replaced with the actual contents. In other words, each chest group is replaced by a chest, always at random. This way, every player has a chest behind a door, but it contains 20 gold coins, an axe, or even a trap. This is never fixed but always random (or dynamically calculated according to certain criteria).

Among other things, this is how I can prepare and reuse maps when developing games and dungeons and still keep them interesting even on the 20th playthrough.