Starting a blog is always the hardest

Lately, I've been working on an RPG in my spare time. The original idea is based on Squidi's Tiny Dungeon model, but it's grown a lot since then. The main point of making the game in the first place is to build some good randomly generated worlds.

I've always been a big fan of dungeon crawlers, and roguelikes in particular, but one of their big falling downs is lack of logic in their randomly generated content. You throw a bunch of rooms into solid rock and connect them with a maze of tunnels that have nothing to do with anything, and look like spagetti. Most people call this a randomly generated dungeon, I call it a spagetti-maze. Especially because the content in each room has nothing to do with the other rooms. Each room is almost exclusively a new entity in and of itself and that's just silly. Who built it? Why is it there? Some games try to hint at those answers, but never very well. Why don't all the infinite variety of monsters eat eachother?

Maybe I'm just biased because of all my years playing Dungeons and Dragons. In this world, it's much harder to get away with rooms that don't connect, or with dungeons out there in the middle of nowhere filled inexplicably with monsters... Well, usually. Lots of DMs and adventures and campaigns are all the same sort of thing - kick down the door, kill the monster, take their stuff. But what's important is dungeon layout.

In DnD, you hever have a hundred feet of twisting hallway to lead to the door to the next room. You have ten at most. Often the rooms will be pressed up against eachother, like they would be in real life. They might not be arranged in much of a logical manner, the contents may still be random, but is a realistic design really so far fetched as to be unable to be randomly generated?

Of course not. Dungeons have to start out as something - prisons, temples, towns - and all of them have distinct looks. Temples start with an atrium, then there's a main place of worship in the back, and some hallways off to the side containing smaller rooms. It's not complicated and as I continue to work on this project and update this blog, we'll see just how simple it is to mimic real-world archetecture using only the NLG.