Ideas for Architects

So you're ready to be a dungeon architect, eh? Well, the job is not so glamorous as everyone makes it out to be. It's hard work, I tell you! Especially building all the walls at right angles so they aren't crooked. And just try to get that damp, moldy smell out of your clothes after hanging out underground all day!

Oh, but you're determined. I can see there's no talking you out of it. Fine, but just remember that we dungeon architects are judged as a group. If one fellow throws together a shoddy hold, we all hang our heads in shame. So you newcomers gotta try a bit harder to avoid the common ugly mistakes.

So let's sit down and have a look at what's needed for the position...

A Spirit of Generosity

There are many different motivations for creating a hold. You may enjoy sitting behind the machinery and pulling the levers. Or you could have profound ideas for rooms that you yourself want to play and wonder how they will work. Possibly, you want to understand how elements behave so you can play better. Maybe you like to show off a bit and make people say, "Wow! That guy must eat brains for breakfast to get so impressively smart."

No motivation is right or wrong, (unless of course you are creating a hold to enslave the masses to your every sadistic whim) but I believe that to produce the most enjoyable puzzles, a spirit of generosity is essential. Think of each room you construct as a gift to your audience. Imagine how nice it will be to receive compliments for your work and know that you've provided a worthwhile distraction.

Not to make it sound like you're saving the world, but maybe some guy in Detroit has an enjoyable twenty minutes of his life while he sits at his work desk munching on a bagel, playing your hold on his lunch break. That's pretty cool, isn't it? Picture all those little brain-racked Beethros bumping around in your rooms, having a good time. You built it, and they came! When you think of how players will react to your creation, you'll be motivated to make the corridors longer, the passages twistier, the formations deadlier--whatever it takes to pack your hold full of memorable entertainment!

Aim for Fun, not Difficulty

A friend of mine proposed a General Law of Puzzles, or maybe it should just be called a General Tendency of Puzzles. The time required to create the puzzle is just about always less than the time required to solve it. We sat down for a while and made up puzzles of all different types. Riddles, logical problems, word guessing, mathematical--one of us would create, and the other would solve. I have to say I'm convinced that the rule holds true for just about any form of puzzle. Certainly in DROD, if your goal is simply to make a difficult room, it is easy throw something together in five minutes that will take a player an hour to slog through. But it's likely that the resulting room will not be fun to play--just hard to beat.

Rooms with Stories

See your puzzles not so much as challenges, but as a little story that will unfold for the player. Put yourself in the player's shoes--what will engage, delight, and amuse him? Confounding the player is just a byproduct of this miniature drama. Okay, I know you're thinking "What story? This is a puzzle game." I mean stories at an abstract level. Here are some examples:

• "Player walks into a room and sees an impossible array of enemies lined up against him. There is no way he can hope to fight through them, but then...he sees hope. If he can rush through a small gap in the monsters to get past them, he will find temporary safety in an alcove."
• "Layers of carefully positioned eyes must be peeled away before the player can gain access to an inner chamber. At several points, the player wonders if there is any way left to him that will make progress, but close scrutiny reveals a weakness."
• "Player is confronted with a series of challenges, and whenever he makes an obvious choice, it turns out to be the wrong one. Always, there is a more subtle solution to each problem. After some false starts, the player begins to tread softly and consider his moves with care."
• "Player sees a lot of mimic potions in the room, which seems good at first, but then he notices there aren't very many places to put mimics. What should have been an easy room to solve is unexpectedly difficult."

Stories like these are possible to express in DROD rooms. To some extent, you can create situations to provoke dramatic thoughts in the player's mind. Admittedly, we aren't directing movies here, but inventing a simple plot for a room can be the best beginning for the puzzles it will contain.

Story Stories

Of course, you can have regular stories with characters, setting, and all the other elements of a novel. From what I've heard, people really do appreciate a little flavor added to their puzzles. So despite your limited opportunities, I recommend putting some work in the hold/level descriptions, scrolls, and NPCs where appropriate.

If you want to keep your story set in the DROD universe, you could read about Beethro and the Eighth on the DROD.CaravelGames.com website to get context and inspiration. There are no restrictions on how you can use existing DROD characters. So have fun, and be creative!

In future versions of DROD, expect even more ways to incorporate story elements into your holds. Also, if you would like to write something a little more ambitious than what can be described in a hold, or perhaps a longer introduction to your hold, you should really consider submitting your work for inclusion on the DROD.CaravelGames.com website.

Avoid Trial-and-Error Puzzles

There are exceptions to every rule, but the trial-and-error type of puzzle is usually pretty annoying. With these you are presented with a number of options and given no clue as to which option is better. So really, the only thing you can do is methodically try each until you chance upon the correct one. What's even worse is when the penalty for the bad choice is death. What's worser than worse is when you have to start over from a long way back and repeat all your moves. What's worstest of all is when a room contains nothing more than a series of trial-and-error situations.

There are three common ways to generate these boring trial-and-error problems:

1. Orbs - A player can click on an orb to see what doors it affects, but if there are several orbs in the room, it becomes difficult to remember what they all do. You can ask the player to make guesses and remember things, but this quickly becomes tedious.
2. Covering things with tar - It can be fun to discover walls and trapdoors under the tar, but again, let's not overdo it. Hint: hold Shift while placing tarstuff to make sure it stays off the walls.
3. Monster movement sequence - The order that monsters move is not readily apparent, but it does affect what happens in the game. Yes, you can be very tricky and set all sorts of specific movement sequences in the editor with puzzles requiring knowledge of the sequence to solve them. But have mercy on the poor guy who will lose his eyesight staring at those tiny little roaches to figure out exactly how they will move. It's particularly unfair when you set up a group of monsters, make some arbitrary movements, and then design a puzzle around the resulting monster formation. You didn't have to predict the monster movements, but your players will. (Or they might just give up and try somebody else's hold instead. You don't want that, do you?)

When information is known to you, the author, but hidden from your players, you should be a bit nicer to them. Throw in some checkpoints. Add a hint scroll or use NPC scripting to have Beethro or someone else share a few hints. Remove some of your red herrings and clutter that would disguise the correct path.

Avoid Exploiting Quirks

The elements of DROD are meant to be simple and predictable by themselves. Combine them together and things get complex. But if you play around in the editor, eventually you're going to find some weird, unpredictable behavior that was overlooked by the development team or is just inherent to the "physics" of DROD. Something like: if a goblin moves diagonally into a square adjacent to a roach queen on the turn preceding the spawn cycle, the roach queen will lay one egg that hatches a turn earlier than the rest. (This doesn't really happen--it's just an example of something weird you might discover.)

You should pat yourself on the back for discovering such an oddity and maybe post to the DROD forum about it, but don't make a puzzle that depends on this bit of esoterica. For two reasons:

1. Players aren't likely to enjoy recreating your anomaly (What? Are they supposed to be DROD scientists or something?)
2. There's a chance that the development team will correct the behavior in the future, and then your puzzle will only work in an older version of DROD. This has happened before.

No, not the Unreachable Rooms Again

It's been a fun joke for me to play on you guys, but probably more fun for me than for those who painstakingly searched through levels to find some way to reach a room I intentionally made unreachable. It looked like you could get to the room, but nope, I guess not. So that's kinda like gluing a quarter to the ground--fun for the prankster, but a letdown for the fellow who tries for it. Since I've already used this cheap trick a few times, it will look a bit old if you use it too.

(I still feel guilty about this. I even came up with a way to make up for the trouble I put people through. You'll see.)

Lynchpin Puzzles

By all means, try to create puzzles with lynchpins. A lynchpin is some one thing that must be discovered for a solution. After the player has the necessary insight, the rest is easy. When the player gets it, he will feel like he's just been converted to a new religion. "Aha!" he says, and a second later, "Why didn't I see that before?" This feeling is more rewarding than slogging through several obvious hurdles. Most of us get that sort of tedium from our jobs, so let us instead bask in the glory of one genius moment!

However, it's probably not wise to put too many lynchpins in one room. Instead, sprinkle them across several rooms: your puzzle domain will be larger, the player will get more psychological breaks between challenges, and everyone will praise you for your several genius ideas.

Slashfests (a.k.a. 'Carpal Tunnel Syndrome' here we come!)

It can be fun to lay waste to a sprawling horde of monsters, even when there isn't any real puzzle to solve. I like to turn my brain off at times and just hack away. But the player can just use the slash macros by holding the Control key while he slashes, making your room of roaches moot. To make this sort of room worth its bytes, require some tactical decisions from the player and inject a little variety. Can't your point be made with fifty roaches instead of five hundred?

(By the way, I'm going back to one of my rooms now and taking out some roaches so I don't look like a hypocrite.)

Cosmetics Counts

It's worth paying attention to how your rooms look--not just to how they play. DROD gives you a detailed 38 x 32 space, which is typically more than is needed to create puzzles. That extra space is for visual style and to make the rooms seem like a place instead of an abstract minimalist grid. There's a whole Feng Shui to it, and nobody can say definitively what makes a room look good or bad, but here's some guidelines and ideas:

• Don't try to cram things and make every square count. You got space, baby! Use the whole room, or several rooms, to fit your puzzle.
• Design the layout of each whole level first so it looks good in the mini-map. Then go back and add puzzles to the rooms. In hindsight, I should have done a lot more of this with Dugan's Dungeon.
• If you have a pit or wall extending past the border of a room, let it continue for a distance in the adjacent room. It's more convincing to see continuity between the rooms instead of abrupt changes, like where a pit suddenly becomes a wall in the next room.
• Just because you can place certain tiles in the editor doesn't mean you should. If you mess around with the editor, you'll be able to create some effects that look decidedly broken. For example, you could make all the walls of a level out of orbs. Well, I guess that's not a crime, but now the player has to work harder to imagine he's inside of a dungeon, what with these ugly little balls all over the screen. Have good reasons for strange visual effects.

We now have some impressive graphical customization features in the DROD level editor. Not only can you choose from a large palette of floor styles and visual elements, but you can also create your own floor, wall and pit art. As a general rule, only use at most two or three floor styles in any one room. Any more than that usually looks garish, distracting, and breaks the player's immersion in the game.

In Conclusion

Well, that's all I have to say about it, and it's certainly enough. As usual, I feel a little embarrassed about going on so long. Often people involved in software engineering follow a policy of saying just enough for the situation, and then moving briskly on to the next problem like a highly-disciplined martial artist. These people seem to get more respect, but I can live without it. I'm more like some kind of DROD preacher. I want you to get an idea of the possibilities, and then go forth and create! If you end up doing some of the things that I said were bad, it really doesn't matter that much to me, and I'm pretty sure the Dungeon Architects Association won't blacklist you. Truthfully, I'll just be happy if you decide to invest a little of your creative energy in this game that me and some other guys wrote.

-Erik

For more on hold building, we recommend checking out the online articles in the "Building" section on DROD.CaravelGames.com and the "Architecture" board on the Caravel Forum.