The obvious choice

If you've been paying attention to my blog so far, you probably figured out what I'm planning on working on for this game design competition. That's right, my dungeon crawler.

Sure, there are dozens of dungeon crawlers out there for every day or every month, but as was my original goal with the tinygame, it wouldnt just be a generic dungeon crawler. It would be an infinitely replayable dungeon crawler with charm. It's a bit of a high goal, and I might not succeed for the game design competition, but that's what I want.

The first thing I need for the game design competition is a story. And how do you make a story in a 'generic' dungeon crawler interesting? Why, you make it as procedurally generated as the dungeon of course! Which lends me to the topic of procedureally generated stories in the first place.

One of the few games I've played with procedurally generated stories is Daggerfall, Elder Scrolls II. When you went to a guild and asked for a quest, it gave you a random reason to go to a random place and kill a random thing. Sometimes this was as simple as " got into house. Go kill it." Other times it was more complex, " broke into the guild and stole . We've tracked it to , go and kill it - and take back our stuff."

It was really simple, but it kept the dungeons - which were rather ridiculous in their own random generation - and the quests themselves nice and flavorful in a world that woiuld have otherwise been extremely samey. I want to implement a similar thing, but since my world is goign to be a much smaller scope, so my story behind it doesn't have to be painted with such broad strokes. I can talk about the creation of the dungeon and it's history, I can make the villian more complex than just a random monster. And most importatly, I can make the story the player discovers as he runs through the game different enough that he might want to play through it more than once.