Dungeon Building Tips?

Post » Tue Jun 19, 2012 2:43 pm

I am getting pretty good at building dungeons and all that although I have no Idea how to do a few things. Anyways, I am wondering if anyone has any tips that can make a noob builders dungeon better. Is bigger better? How many is to many encounters? What is too much loot, how much should you clutter? All those sort of questions. I like my dungeons but I don't know if others would, so I am just asking for tips on making them to somewhat suite most peoples liking.
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Carlos Vazquez
 
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Post » Tue Jun 19, 2012 9:18 am

Bigger is not always better. It's tempting to make one huge amazing room after another and hurl clusters of monsters at the player, but it's better to have some tight rooms and passages in there, too. It ends up making the big rooms or special encounters stand out more. A lot of it boils down to taste, but variety is always a good thing. My favorite Bethesda dungeons have interesting spaces for combat: platforms, stairways, half walls, that compensate for the weaknesses in the enemy ai (like putting a caster up on a platform that is hard for you to get to - rather than an open space where an ai caster might just run headlong onto your sword. Or having several side passages meet at a crossroads with enemies coming down several of them, forcing you think about the best positioning to fight them)

I do remember seeing some good articles on the web back when I was working with the Oblivion CS. I'm sure some of them are still up: a search for "level design" should pull some up for you. In some ways, the Skyrim dungeons followed those tips to a T, such as looping the dungeon around for an easy exit (sometimes I think they took that tip too literally, in my opinion). But then, making a player run back through a huge, but now empty, dungeon, isn't really a good thing, either

If you think your dungeon is reasonably polished, go ahead and release it. You won't be able to please everyone and it helps to thicken your skin a little, but most players try to give constructive feedback. And if they're smart, they'll be forgiving of "newbie" mistakes, since everyone's still getting a handle on the CK, anyway. You can always update your mod, or put the lessons learned to use in your next one.
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RAww DInsaww
 
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Post » Tue Jun 19, 2012 7:00 pm

There probably isn't a best way to make a dungeon, because it comes down to what the players like, and all players are different. But you could first ask yourself, what to like in a dungeon, when you play.

Personally I love the Skyrim dungeons, and I think they are much better than the Oblivion dungeons for severel reasons, so I think you should think about those things.
First of all uniqueness, which Oblivion lacked is done well here with more varied designs and the frequent stories related to the dungeons (either a quest or just diaries), a unique boss and a unique artifact would also be nice. This could be really good (but not completely overpowered), but the dungeon should not be crowded with expensive items.
It could contain a series of items to collect for a quest (like the 30 nirnroot in Blackreach).
Encountering a bonedragon, a secret garden and other interesting zones is nice, some ore to mine is also nice (my character always has his pickaxe), so again uniqueness.

so a big unique dungeon with memorable moments, a quest and a unique artifact, which you get after beating an interesting boss would be, what i would like in a dungeon.
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Averielle Garcia
 
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Post » Tue Jun 19, 2012 7:05 pm

I'm not exactly an experianced modder, but I've played RPG's since the early 1980's. One of my pet peeves about dungeon designs is and endless stream of rooms that serve no purpose other than to give players another door to open or another critter to fight. Rooms should have a purpose. Even if the purpose isn't obvious to the player. That doesn't mean that big is bad, but it's kinda hard to reconcile building a 30 room undergound dungeon maze with gold walls that's populated by bandits.

One of the things that annoy me about Skyrim is how obvious the traps are and how easy they are to avoid. It's quite silly to put a trap down that isn't hidden and doesn't even slow the player down. A trap should be unexpected and damn near fatal, or at the very least distracting enough to make the player stop racing around.

I'm not a huge fan of the "end-boss" mentality. Why does the "boss" always have to be at the back of the dungeon? Is that one of the rules of bossery? Mix it up. Have the player stumble through a tough trap that alarms a multiambush with the boss before the player gets through the first room.

The encounters in Skyrim are too easy and too sparse..especially over level 20. After level 30 the game is an absurd joke of balance. Try to figure a way to plan accordingly.

Don't mix incompatible critters in your encounters. Bandits and undead? No. Unless the leader of the bandits is a necromancer...

I like rooms and locations that give teaser views of other areas where the entrance and exit aren't readily apparent.

I'm not a fan of the "shortcut" door to the exit in evey.single.dungeon.in.the.game.

I think that the right number of encounters is the number that keeps the player from sprinting from one fight to the next. That's really hard to plan for with the bad design decisions that were made for balance. Unless you can do some master scripting to accomodate melee AND stealth archers AND mages, it's going to tought to create well balanced enounters.

Good story trumps good dungeon layout. Books. NPC's. Interaction.
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Kitana Lucas
 
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Post » Tue Jun 19, 2012 10:01 am

You can always look up some books on level design there are a ton of those, I'm sure some of the explains those things you say.
But one important thing you need in your dungeon to make it fun is flow. Constantly let the player be challenged, but not too much as It would create frustration. So maybe you would make a big room with enemies, but you give the player some healing potions right before or right after.
It is easy for a level designer to fall in the trap and make the dungeon incredible difficult and just "punish" the player too much (random death events is not fun, like death traps they could not forseen, or maybe you add an insane enemy that you can only destroy if you remembered to pick up the ring of killing monsters that you placed behind a chest in the beginning of the dungeon :P ).
Another thing you can try is to make your friends test your dungeon and let them say where the fun part of the dungeon was and so on. Also try to test your dungeon with different characters to see if your dungeon is too easy as a mage, but difficult like hell for a melee character :) I hope this will Help you
oh and PS mazes are not popular in general, you need a really good reason to put them in your dungeon, even though they are really fun to make.
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Imy Davies
 
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