Grimrock

Guys, there is a random dungeon generator coming. It's called the dungeon editor, the devs are working on it right now. It will produce heaps of varied dungeons ranging from awesome to terrible, and we'll be playing Grimrock for years to come.

krayzkrok wrote:Guys, there is a random dungeon generator coming. It's called the dungeon editor, the devs are working on it right now. It will produce heaps of varied dungeons ranging from awesome to terrible, and we'll be playing Grimrock for years to come.

Durrr... No. User-made dungeons are not the same thing.

Say, I want to take a quick, 15 minute jaunt into the dungeon, hacking my way through some monsters. I'll spend the first 14 minutes searching for a good dungeon to download for that? Or, I could just click "generate a short dungeon with lots of monsters" button and start the game.

See the difference?

I don't know if this has been mentioned yet so...Captive programmed by Antony Crowther had 65,535 randomly generated levels. The interesting thing was that the generation was so good that each level 'felt' man-made.

More details on how this astonishing achievement was produced can be found here

Well worth a read for our esteemed Grimrock developers.

Remember the randomly generated dungons in Neverwinter Nights?

This would actually be useful for one purpose - generating a 'random' layout. Having the option to 'generate' each floor and make changes would be really useful. Things like spawn-points, doors, traps, etc., would all have to be added after the fact.

Flashheart wrote:I don't know if this has been mentioned yet so...Captive programmed by Antony Crowther had 65,535 randomly generated levels. The interesting thing was that the generation was so good that each level 'felt' man-made.

More details on how this astonishing achievement was produced can be found here

Thanks for the link, certainly looks like an interesting site Captive was one of my favorite games on the Amiga, just after DM/CSB, Pool of Radiance and Ultima IV/V.

petri wrote:The only doubt I have about random dungeon generation is, is it fun? It works great in roguelikes, e.g. ADOM, because you can see the whole explored map all the time, but what about when you only see a tiny sliver of the randomly generated level (the viewpoint in LoG)?

Approaching the issue from another angle:
Because there is no intelligent design in randomly generated levels you become easily lost. Therefore the next logical step would be to add an automap that is always visible on the screen. And then suddenly you're moving around on the map, and the 3D view becomes more or less a gimmick. So why not get rid of the 3D first person view and make the auto map really pretty with a topdown/isometric view, with animated player character, etc.? Hmm, this reminds me of some pretty famous diabolical game...

quoting this because its true, but also...

premade dungeons have a distinct advantage as far as fun factor because they generally have pretty clever puzzles built into them, and are more often than not designed around the puzzles, rather than the other way around. random dungeons do not have this sort of luxury. if everything about the dungeon is random, and you want to have puzzles in them, they generally have to be very simple, or best case scenario, are kind of complex but are just code copy pasta at which point they get reused far too often and thus, become mundane.

randomly generated dungeons generally lead to hack and slash games, which leads to games that require super-characters, which makes an entirely different game than what legend of grimrock is.

rather than making a random dungeon generator, i would much rather see a patch made that easily implements a user created content upload/download hub. i also would love to see almost human made add-on dungeons.

\/4n!ll4 ][c3 wrote: randomly generated dungeons generally lead to hack and slash games, which leads to games that require super-characters, which makes an entirely different game than what legend of grimrock is.

Grimrock is, AFAICS, a hack'n'slash game, interspersed with some clever puzzles. (or, puzzles interspersed with some hack'n'slash)
I don't think a well-made dungeon generator would allow superpowered characters; the generator would just need to be stingy with the resources it gives.
And, for a quick dungeon trip, I'd be perfectly happy with some levers to pull and buttons to push, no need to get all cerebral when it's supposed to be a quick diversion...

petri wrote:

Flashheart wrote:I don't know if this has been mentioned yet so...Captive programmed by Antony Crowther had 65,535 randomly generated levels. The interesting thing was that the generation was so good that each level 'felt' man-made.

More details on how this astonishing achievement was produced can be found here

Thanks for the link, certainly looks like an interesting site

Thanks for the comment, I'm the webmaster of that site

+1 for random dungeon generation. Was hoping this LOG1 had it but didn't, LOG2 it's missing as well. Bring back the Dungeon Hack experience.