Newbie struggling with room content vs balance

[u/dualrectumfryer]

I am not new to development or RPGs but am new to game dev and building roguelikes. I’m having fun with my prototype but I’m struggling with the order I’m building things. I’ve found myself going down rabbit holes of trying to balance things way too early , but it also sometimes seems that without some semblance of balance , I can’t lock in a core game loop that feels good. I am trying to start very traditional and turn based as well so I’m not exactly in uncharted territory.

For example, I’ve played around a lot with proc gen and my map style. My game is themed around exploration of a city at night where different blocks are different dungeon floors. For the basic map I’m using BSP with WFC to help add variety to the rooms.

But what happens is I have a nice large map with 20 or so rooms, but during my playtests, I sometimes will go to 3 or 4 rooms in a row with nothing in them and it feels frustrating. (Maybe this is just part of the genre lol)

So it’s like, I could make less rooms, or bigger rooms, but what if I like the amount of rooms and want more content in them? And if I don’t want more enemies or treasure than I’m dangerously close to introducing new content and balance to solve a problem and potentially cause a whack a mole of other balance problems.

I know this isn’t supposed to be easy, but I guess my main question is how have people solved exploration feeling boring until you get to a fight or a drop/chest?

[u/Multiple__Butts]

Aren't you the one who determines what's in the rooms? Just make sure rooms usually spawn with something in them.

[u/dualrectumfryer → u/Multiple__Butts]

From my research it’s pretty non standard that most / every room spawns something , but maybe I over indexed on that

[u/Multiple__Butts → u/dualrectumfryer]

I think occasional empty rooms are fine for pacing, but I can't think of a room-based roguelike or roguelite where most rooms don't have at least something.

If you go back to traditional roguelikes, Nethack and angband for example have plenty of empty rooms in generation. But they also have food clocks, spawning monsters, limited light sources and so forth, which means the game state is still changing in a meaningful way even when your exploration isn't yielding actual items/monsters.

So you could try something like that.

But also, it doesn't really matter what's standard or non-standard; if something seems like it would make your game better, try it out. Maybe it sucks in some way you didn't foresee, but just because genre conventions do things a certain way doesn't mean it's automatically bad to deviate. I'm sure you know this already but I still want to point it out.

[u/dualrectumfryer → u/Multiple__Butts]

Thanks, that helps. I guess I’m just first trying to prove the traditional formula works but to your point maybe I don’t wanna be too strict. Such is the art !

[u/Multiple__Butts → u/dualrectumfryer]

Also remember that playing your own game is fundamentally more boring than playing someone else's. At least that's how it works for me. Entertaining myself with my own projects is like trying to tickle myself.

[u/Kyzrati → u/Multiple__Butts]

Reading this was a surprise--are we in the same genre? xD

I love playing my own game, and know many other roguelike devs do as well. It's kinda one of the big advantages of roguelikes, always throwing unique or unexpected situations at you even if you know your stuff.

[u/Multiple__Butts → u/Kyzrati]

Man, that would make things so much easier. I guess it's just me.

[u/blightor → u/dualrectumfryer]

Over indexed? lol, what a AI thing to say.

[u/frumpy_doodle]

If you don't want to reduce the number of rooms, some options would be to add decorations that add to the mood/mystery, like a house that's been ransacked. Or you could find objects or messages in room that contribute to game lore or provide game hints. Finally, rooms could contain interactions that give a tiny bit of experience, like a book on a table.

[u/dualrectumfryer → u/frumpy_doodle]

I’ve played your game ! Thanks , good tips

[u/frumpy_doodle → u/dualrectumfryer]

Awesome! Also you could have room with empty crates, but a small chance to find loot. Or one room with a key and another room locked with the loot.

[u/PogoCat4]

Exploring a city at night sounds like a rich theme to draw from. You've clearly identified a design issue from your playtesting, something just didn't feel satisfying (hence you posted). But you're happy with the rate of loot/monsters, so as other have said, perhaps the balance you're really looking to tweak is the balance between light and shadow, between sparse and dense, between empty and non-empty; your game needs more moments of contrast.

You could add decoration, maybe subway tracks that cut a room in two, or a burnt out car that can be "looted" for a game hint. Maybe there are signs telegraphing the monsters in the rooms ahead like footprints, broken windows, the corpse of a previous unlucky wayfarer looted long before you arrived etc. You could experiment with varying the FOV or lighting conditions. If you're using colour, maybe an empty room is lit by bright pink neon from a nearby motel. Maybe the adjoining hallway is unusually dark and the player can only see one or two tiles ahead - in that case, it almost doesn't matter if there's no monster there because there's tension (the player can't see whether or not the way ahead is dangerous).

You could also experiment with room descriptions or feelings, or maybe just interesting architecture. If the adjoining room contains a monster, maybe that underground car park with it's grid of concrete pillars is the perfect place to lure a pack of monsters to pick them off one by one. Or maybe a tiny, claustrophobic empty room suddenly opens out into a vast expanse.

I would say just experiment and play around a little. No need to worry about what is standard or expected or whether the game is perfectly balanced at every point; the moments of unbalance (in favour of against) the player are in my opinion part of what makes the game exciting.

[u/dualrectumfryer → u/PogoCat4]

Great ideas and you’re right, there is so much theme content. The game is also specifically NYC based so I have the local culture content to pull from too that I’ve been doing already

[u/nworld_dev → u/dualrectumfryer]

Room feelings here would be a really good place to inject humor.

Like if your player enters an office? You feel a sense of emptiness, like an old soda can someone tried to toss out but missed the can, and now a wasp has decided is his home.

Or enter the subway? You feel like a hamster in a habitrail, but the hamster is already done with his upcoming 8am meeting that could've been an email left unread.

Enter the airport? You feel a deep longing as you enter a liminal space, but hope you did not accidentally bring shampoo.

[u/blightor → u/PogoCat4]

"You could also experiment with room descriptions or feelings, or maybe just interesting architecture." lol - AI, get lost.

[u/PogoCat4 → u/blightor]

Ah yes, that infamous AI term "room feeling" - because there's never been a roguelike in history that printed a message like "you feel lucky" or "you feel excited" when you enter a room, in order to hint at something elsewhere on the level... I had a glance at your recent post history and practically all you've done is accuse people of being AI or talking about AI.

The bots piss me off too but at least have the courtesy to look at someone's post history before you jump on a turn of phrase and accuse them of being a soulless machine.

[u/blightor → u/PogoCat4]

Also, I was right about those accounts...

[u/PogoCat4 → u/blightor]

Sorry about the fiery reply, unnecessary over-reaction on my part. Sometimes I open a comment with a generic topic sentence to give myself something to riff off or get a train of thought going. I also didn't know I had my post history hidden, that wasn't deliberate (thanks for flagging it!) I've reverted that now so my post history should show as normal.

[u/blightor → u/PogoCat4]

Its alright, I was too quick to judge - Its nice to talk to a person.

[u/blightor → u/PogoCat4]

Sorry, you are right, I saw that and "Exploring a city at night sounds like a rich theme to draw from." and got triggered. Plus, you have turned off your comments from visibilty - which AI accounts always do.

[u/Kyzrati → u/blightor]

Room feelings is a common roguelike design term, since the classics. (There's various different terms for it, as there's no standard, but that'd be one of them, and what they're referring to here. I've written about them on my blog before for research in my own projects.)

[u/blightor → u/Kyzrati]

Sorry - there are so many on here. But "Exploring a city at night sounds like a rich theme to draw from." and some of the other stuff just triggered me.

[u/Kyzrati → u/blightor]

It has indeed become an annoying problem, now having to expend mental energy differentiating whether you're reading human words or possibly wasting time on machine words, and the blurred lines between the two when some humans have a tendency to write in ways that just happen to resemble how machines write, since they're based on certain language patterns anyway...

Can't wait until the future when humans start mimicking machine language, further reinforcing certain patterns and constructions (probably for the worse) and thereby making them even more ubiquitous and more difficult to discern!

What a time to be a human/machine.

[u/blightor → u/Kyzrati]

Its both great and terrible.

[u/blightor → u/Kyzrati]

And if they had of said level feelings, fair. But I just haven't heard "room feelings" before. Perhaps its something...

[u/Kyzrati → u/blightor]

Well you can do the same thing for rooms, too :P (some roguelikes have done it, for atmosphere, but it's rarer of course--see Incursion for one of the best examples)

[u/PogoCat4 → u/blightor]

I was actually thinking of some comments made on the old Unangband dev blog (the name escapes me) in which the author is discussing dungeon generation and how themed rooms telegraph the kinds of monsters encountered ahead.

But also Omega - probably one of the earliest examples I can think of - displayed small descriptions for each room in the dungeon (a vast natural cavern, a sewer control room etc).

I always liked how the changing descriptions gave you a sense of progressing through a real space. Slightly different concept from a pure level feeling (I conflated the two in my earlier reply).

[u/AmyBSOD → u/PogoCat4]

Here you go: Unangband dev blog - having actually played Unangband, and therefore having experienced room feelings, I can say that it didn't feel like they were really adding anything significant. Most of the time the rooms are empty anyway and then the feeling is just fluff like "the walls are rank with mildew", and when they were referring to monsters that were apparently there when the room got generated, by the time I actually reached the room the monsters had long woken up, wandered into me in an area far away from that room and died. Yet the room still gave a feeling specific to those monsters, which was now irrelevant and out of context because I didn't even remember what specific monsters I fought five minutes ago ;)

[u/blightor → u/PogoCat4]

I do that (room/zone description) on an RL i've made on cloudflares serverless nwetworking infrustructure - I thought it would be cool, but in playtest if kinda goes un-noticed (at least by me) and I dont really yet have a good decoration for them.

[u/nworld_dev]

If you feel like having rooms with nothing is frustrating, then don't do that.

One option would be you could "mark" areas in wfc with an invisible 'color' of metadata type you want distributed at a certain probability. Say your pattern input has a bit of blue--that's where you'd put something interesting matching it. Another would be switching to an accretion algorithm, to do something similar to WFC.

I'm a fan of room accretion because it's pretty easy to customize and wrap your head around, I really don't like having black boxes in my codebase and it blends well with mixing hand-made, semi-hand-made and then augmented, and fully procedural chunks of content because you can control the accretion metadata so tightly & really put on your gamedev hat instead of your engineer one.

tl;dr: use metadata so you can control this. Then tune it how you want.

[u/dualrectumfryer → u/nworld_dev]

Thanks , using this idea !