Great Dungeon in the sky

Hey guys, I haven't dissapeared, I swear. I'm working on some other projects, but until I actually get a goal figured out, I want to keep it quiet on here.

For now, I'll just talk about another more-less procedural game, the great dungeon in the sky. It's an online flash-based game, too. Which is awesome.

GDIS, put into one sentance is a platforming game where you select one of... oh, about two hundred characters each with around three of... about five hundred abilities and run through... about a randomly generated hundred levels. That's a lot of content!

What makes the game so fun is not that you have so much selection, but in fact how that selection is unlocked. In order to play as a particular character other than the starting ten, you have to defeat him in one of the maps. Not so hard, until you consider that with three hundred characters that's a lot of guys to look for.

There are a handful of map types, each with a particular pattern. There is a small cave to the bottom left, a series of collums to the top right, and so on. each map is different and difficult in it's own way, some moreso than others.

Each map also has a number of spawns, each of which can spawn one of a certain number of creatures. For instance, in one map you start off facing against an animal over a hole in the ground. This animal is randomly selected from the twenty or so in the game (every one with a unique sprite, too), and that's what you see. Then you drop down to a random selection of orcs, then you fight your way through several mages, climb the stairs to fight a ghost, and the level is done.

No single level is too long, you can run through a level in three minutes, but each of those encounters can be fatal if you're not careful. One of those orcs might be a shaman, who can paralyze you - and then the warriors can take their time cutting you to bite-sized bits. The ghost might happen to be a strage cube of redness, and transform you into a red cube. It's different every time, but the strategy is always much the same. Get to the end, watch for ambushes, and win. Also, every type of map has different types of enemies in it - one is always full of various soldiers for instance, so not only do you have to survive, you have to fight everything to unlock them.

There are also a few more-secret type areas that are harder to get to, with a more powerful selection of monsters. If you climb up those pillars to the right, you'll reach a small plateau with a powerful monster. If you delve into the cave to the bottom right you can fight a powerful elemental. (okay, fine, except for the citrus elemental.)

But then there are a few even *more* secret areas that can only be accessed by the small group of characters with super-jumping or flight abilities. these characters are more special characters to run across, like the green knight or the baby boy - just fun and challenging to collect them all.

While there could be a lot more to the game - some sort of random map generator would add a little more variety to the game, but I wonder if that'd even be nessicarry. there are enough maps to add variety but few enough to breed familiarity with them, so you never know quite what to expect, but neither are you totally surprised. A good balance as it is.

I'm quite enjoying the game, and you should look into it too.