CFD 2012: Discussion thread (Submission Thread Link Within)

[Montis]

nice input sevenbirds. imho each designer should get two levels, so that he can actually use pits freely.

[Edsploration]

Two dungeon levels per designer is a great idea! I think this is a must. Pits would not be allowed if you use just one level, or on the bottom level if you use two.

My post is about two more hurdles I'd like to bring up and see everyone's thoughts about: the difficulty/experience curve, and itemization (loot).

Finally, I believe that the first and last floors need to be special in some way. the first needs to be both a nice introduction to whatever overall "story", present the premise of such a...varied dungeon and also be interesting without being so difficult that it dissuades players from going any farther. The last level could be many things, and until we have a good portion of the dungeon it will be hard to say what it could be. I think that a lot of custom content would be best for the last level; something completely different and new.

The way I see it, many people would contribute to this as a Frankenstein combination of contributions. (I'll call it the Community Frankenstein Dungeon for now.) So you wouldn't necessarily know beforehand what was going to be submitted, by who, or which level it would be. Well the "Endless Dungeon 2012" could be planned out step by step, one level at a time by one designer at a time. Or it could be a random assortment of puzzles without having to consider the difficulty/experience curve. Personally I would prefer a system that (1) allows everyone to participate without waiting their turn or being pre-approved (within reason), and (2) uses a difficulty/experience curve and all the elements of the vanilla game. Oh and (3) allows the final product dungeon to be a surprise even to other designers/contributors. This may not be the way things end up, and that's fine. I just wanted to reveal my preference because my hurdles/solutions proposed below are written assuming this sort of community dungeon is the end goal. So! Onto the 110m hurdles!

The first huge hurdle is monster level and experience earned being out of sync. The best (simplest) solution I can think of is to have every submission come with two reference numbers:
- difficulty index (highest difficulty fight on the level)
- total experience available on the level

The first could be decided by an objective table of the level the party is expected to be to be able to fight monster X. For example:
snail 1
troll 5
etc
So if the hardest fight on a dungeon level is a single troll, the dungeon level gets a "difficulty" rating of 5. If the hardest fight on a dungeon level is TWO trolls, it could be a rating of 5 + (1/2) * 5 = 7.5. That is, there is a 1/2 modifier for extra monsters that must be fought at once. A troll and four snails would be 5 + (4) * 1 * (1/2) = 7. This way during submissions there could be a histogram showing which difficulty dungeon levels are already plentiful, and which are needed.

The second, the total experience index would be found by simply counting up the monsters on the dungeon level. If you have spawners, you'd have to estimate how many monsters will be fought by a party.

These two numbers together would serve two uses. First, they would let the person compiling the dungeon levels together see what has to fit where. Or a program could be written to randomly order the dungeon levels keeping with a viable difficulty/experience curve. Second, they could be used to give a histogram report, for part way through the submission period, of what dungeon levels were still needed. For example:

Difficulty Index | Number Submitted | Total experience | Submissions Remaining
........Intro..................1........................N/A.....................-closed-
........0-1....................1......................1 level....................-closed-
........1.1-2.................0......................0 levels......................1-2
........2.1-3.................0......................0 levels......................1-2
........3.1-4.................2.....................1.1 level...................-closed-
........4.1-6.................4.....................1.5 levels.....................1
........6.1-8.................5......................4 levels...................-closed-*
........8.1-10................1.....................0.5 levels....................0-1
........10.1-13..............1.....................0.5 levels.....................1
........13.1+ (endgame)...5......................4 levels..................-unlimited-
........N/A (puzzle-only)...3......................0 level...................-unlimited-
........Finale................0........................N/A.........................1

Here we can see that spots are still open for dungeon levels of difficulty 1.1-3, and a little for 8.1-13. *One or more of the difficulty index 6.1-8 levels should be ramped up or dropped down to a different tier, or just consider it to fill the 8.1-10 tier as well. The N/A difficulty tier are for levels that only contain puzzles and no monster fights. These can be inserted anywhere within the overall dungeon. The 0-13 tiers are limited, so people using these tiers should be limited on how much experience they are allowed to give the party. Any extra submissions beyond these will have to be in the puzzle-only or endgame tiers. Perhaps this sort of histogram report could be posted every week of submissions until the dungeon is ready for release!

I separated out an Intro and Finale submission just to allow someone a spot to put introductory/credits in-game, and end on a level that has a congratulations room rather than a deadend into a broken down staircase. These would both be small levels without any real game content besides scrolls and wall text and maybe fancy lighting effects or something.

The other big hurdle I see is how to handle itemization in a simple way. Or put another way, how do you support every potential character build throughout the Community Frankenstein Dungeon? If a player makes a dagger-wielding-rogue, they should be able to find progressively more powerful daggers as they progress in the dungeon. The same is true for axe-fighters, sword-fighters, mace-fighters, crossbowmen, bowmen, unarmed, fire magic, ice magic, poison magic, lightning magic, etc etc. This makes it seemingly impossible to arrange a viable dungeon from random submissions. Well I see two ways it could be handled:

1) Simply require every designer to support 75% or so of the possible builds with loot on their level, and by chance it should all even out to 100% for the whole dungeon. This could be frustrating for the player who chooses a build which happens to have a long dry spell on relevant loot. But that's the kind of fun you get when you play the Community Frankenstein Dungeon!

2) Show loot relevant to each build in extra columns accomponying the histogram report (as described above). Although less simple, I would prefer this solution because it allows designers to smooth out holes where one build isn't supported for too many levels, and it also allows designers to forgo loot entirely and not include ANY on their level if they don't want to. This doesn't stop the possibility of three designers in a row making a special room for the Sword of Nex, but that would just be comedy gold!

So that's about it. I'm happy to draft some submission forms if this is the sort of thing we end up doing. Although the vanilla game's content (both monsters and items) have to be assigned a difficulty index first. We could just use the dungeon level that they first appear on in the vanilla game and see if that works well enough.

[Shroom]

I like the sound of this. 2 Levels seems a good idea too.

Another consideration would be the relative 'toughness' of fights - whilst this could be scaled after everything is finished, if monsters are generally beginner difficulty, then it makes sense for that level(s) to go near the start. Maybe grade the toughness 1-10 with 10 being very tough indeed (I know this is all relative, but you get the idea)

Edit:- Wall of text above just covered what I said and more! :p

[Montis]

Nice input as well by Edsploration. I like the term "Community FrankenDungeon"

[Komag]

Wow edsploration, that's really well thought out

[HaunterV]

There seems to be some confusion on my idea of ppl using the corners for the entrance and exit to their levels

My intention is this;

SpoilerShow

You would come into the level in this case the top left corner which puts one space in front of you to walk until you get to the teleporter, that teleporter will take you to an entrance that is somewhere in side the black border. the level can be any size and or shape and or complexity. the exit would be another teleporter that takes you to the bottom right section where you then take the telporter or stairs down.

Now my intention with this is that when a level is submitted i would really only have to look at where the start and end location would be then make note and put it in the sequence with a floor above and below that have matching entrance/exits

nowhere is it implied that you need to start your level design in the corner, merely think of it as an elevator or stairwell. and in this case the predictability of where the actual entrance and exits of a level is pretty much a non issue since if you are using teleporters to get to and from the stairwells, well then... people won't know what to expect.

[Lmaoboat]

I don't think pits would be too much a problem. The way the might make you work around them might help with coming up with ideas.

[Montis]

I don't think pits would be too much a problem. The way the might make you work around them might help with coming up with ideas.

The problem is in the concept itself. Since it wont be "first guy doing first floor, then second guy doing second floor" but "everyone doing their floors at the same time and later putting them together", your suggested approach wouldn't work.

[Edsploration]

I'm happy my ideas were well received.
I'm back with another hurdle to discuss, and some not-hurdle, but-fun, stuff.

The hurdle is... what to do about keys? Any keys placed in the Community FrankenDungeon would be able to be carried between dungeon levels under normal conditions. I think this would be a catastrophe of inter-connected puzzles which could easily become trivial or even impossible for the abusive or innocent-but-unlucky player. There are plenty of ways to prevent that, but what's hard to come up with is a simple way that (1) could be implemented in any dungeon, and (2) is easy for anyone to follow/implement.

Well I did just think of something new while writing this. It's not the most immersive idea but it's pretty immune to weaselly tactics. How about at the beginning of every new designer's dungeon, as soon as the player enters the dungeon level, a script is run to search the party's inventory + mouse, delete those keys, and drop new ones at the top of the stairs on the previous level. Granted this really breaks immersion and could seriously confuse some people. But I suppose the script could also play a sound and flash lights as if the player was shoplifting. And a scroll could be dropped saying something about "Angering the Dungeon Gods" or "Unbalancing Yin and Yang" or "Insert random plot device here". By the way, I think the Power Weapon has to be dungeon-level-restricted as well for its ability to screw up any puzzles or Indiana-Jones-run-away moments which make use of the cube. (Edit: Nevermind, non-issue.) I'll try testing this later and hopefully it'll work, or it's back to the drawing board.

Sorry if this sounds like layering on "rules", but I think they serve an important purpose for making random dungeon levels link-able. If it's a simply copy/paste script it could be implemented by the organizer instead of each designer individually. And think of all that piece of mind as a designer knowing the player can't show up to Poker Night with their sleeves full of aces!

But seriously if someone has a simpler way I'm all ears.

Now onto the real exciting stuff (for me anyway)! I've started making a few tools to make organizing a Community FrankenDungeon smooth and doable the way I described in my last post! Part of this will be a script that will read a dungeon.lua file and give an analysis of content, XP sources per dungeon level, and a rough difficulty ramp estimate. Actually this should also be useful for anyone wanting to know "What level will the player of my dungeon be after dungeon level 3?", as well as some other ways I probably can't think of right now!

For including the Difficulty Index metric (DI), I really want/need a table of all the items and monsters in the game and which dungeon level they first appear on in the main Legend of Grimrock game. Does anyone know where to find this out? I'd really rather not look into it myself because I haven't yet found all the secrets in the game, and I really like finding them by myself without outside help.

[Ixnatifual]

Can't designers just make sure any keys gained in their levels must also be expended before reaching the stairs leading to the next designer's levels?