I’ve played dungeons of all kinds in video games. They always seem to be very intricate and difficult to make. Sometimes, I really have trouble figuring them out. When designing dungeons, I keep trying to shoot for these crazy logical puzzles, and before I know it, I’ve created a complete mess. The problem is I’m completely missing the point with a dungeon.
Rather than focus on the entire dungeon at once, try to focus on it one room at a time. You can connect the rooms later. This goes back to the chunking idea I mentioned in my last article.
So… how do you make a puzzle? Well, start with one room. What do you need to do in order to get out of the room? That’s ultimately the solution: escape the room. From here, you start simple, then start making it more complicated. I’ll throw some ideas out there for you to get started, but I urge you to get more creative than that.
I’ll use a Zelda example. To escape the room, you need a key. Key opens the door, and you’re free. Ok, fair enough… but… where’s the key? Is it lying on the ground out in the open? Is it in a chest? Is an enemy carrying it? Or maybe… maybe the key will become available after you kill all the enemies in the room? Ah, there’s an idea! But wait, there are no enemies in the room… We’ll need to kill baddies to get the key, so how do we get the baddies in there? Do they just “show up”, or do you flip a switch? Ok, let’s go with a switch to make the enemies show up. But where is this switch? Do you want it out in the plain view? Or maybe, we wanna hide it a bit, and give the user a clue as to where it is… Maybe we wanna make it a button, and we’ll put a ton of buttons all over the room… but we’ll denote which button they need to press through the torches on the walls. The best way to let a player know something’s up is symmetrical anomalies. Put torches on the wall in a symmetrical order, but let one lone torch show the button the user needs to press.
Do you see the process now? Start simple, then build upon it to make it more complicated. Now that room needs you to push a button, kill all the enemies, pick up the key, and open the door. There’s a typical puzzle. Now, on to the next room. Get just as creative.
This is the point when you decide to throw puzzle elements involving multiple rooms. You’ll want to solve a puzzle in one room to make something happen in another room. Again, start simple.
Room 1 and Room 2. Room 1 has a giant hole full of lava between it and the way out. You’ve already killed everything in the room, and you retrieved, say, a source of fire. Well what the hell do I do with a source of fire?! You move to Room 2, and light something. This light powers something that makes a bridge appear over the lava. Ok, fair enough.
And now we make this more complicated.
Room 2 shouldn’t be as simple as walking in and setting things on fire… how about we throw in a jumping puzzle? Put a bunch of lava on the floor, and make platforms that lead to the flammable thing that needs to be lit. Now the user has to use their hand-eye coordination to get that light lit. And what if it’s lit? Should we just leave the bridge there for ‘em? or… should we leave it open on a timer, forcing the user to hurry the hell up and get back to Room 1? Yeah, that sounds like a good idea, don’t you think? Adds some challenge, and a little suspense to it. The user hops across, lights the flammable thingy, then quickly hops back across, dashes across the new bridge, and makes it into the next room.
From here, you just have to keep getting creative. But always follow that process. Decide whether you want a door to open, or a path to open. Then decide what event should trigger it. Then decide what event should trigger the availability of the door opening trigger… and so on.
Once you have all these rooms created, all you have to do is connect them. Once connected, you must design the last room: the boss room.
Designing a boss room follows the same logic as designing the other rooms. You just have to keep in mind that a big bad monster is gonna kick the crap out of the user the whole time, so don’t make it too complicated. Make the puzzle easy to understand, but difficult to execute.
Make the boss room a lava room, with platforms. The user must hop across the platforms to the other side, in order to push a button. This button will make other platforms appear. After activating all the buttons, the lava completely goes away. This frees the user up to focus solely on the boss monster. You can also make the lava come back in the middle of the battle to keep the user on their toes.
When the boss is finally defeated, either make a key item drop to get them out, or simply just open a door… it really doesn’t matter here. At this point, the dungeon has been cleared, so making the exit easy really is most desired. It’s almost the dungeon’s way of saying “Now I only want you gone.”
So, we’ve made a bunch of rooms, with a bunch of overcomplicated puzzles, and then we connected ‘em all together. Pretty straightforward as far as dungeons go. They’ll get better the more you do it. After a while you’ll get tired of the typical way of escaping a room, and find even more intricate and creative ways of doing it.
And that’s how you design a dungeon, Charlie Brown.