Random dungeon

A random dungeon is a video game design philosophy, usually found in action RPG games, in which most or all of the gameplay takes place in dungeons that are generated by the computer using an algorithm, such that the dungeon is laid out differently every time the player enters it, and a player often never plays through quite the same dungeon twice.

Random dungeons first appeared in ASCII adventure games like Rogue and the "roguelikes", combining the kinds of maze-like dungeons found in Dungeons & Dragons with a computer's ability to generate mazes on the fly. Random dungeons have followed video game technology through the advent of 2D and subsequently 3D graphics, although they still often rely on most of the same basic algorithms that were used when they used ASCII graphics.

Examples of games that center around random dungeons

ASCII

• Rogue
• Angband
• Nethack

"Skins" have been made for many of these old ASCII graphics games that use richer 2D graphics in place of the ASCII characters.

2D

• Diablo
• Diablo II
• Chocobo's Mysterious Dungeon
• Disgaea features random dungeons, but only in the "item dungeons" used to increase the power of items. All other battlefields in the game are static.

3D

• Fate
• Dark Cloud 2

See also

• Hack and slash
• Dungeon crawl

External links

• Jamis Buck's Random Dungeon Generator, which uses a similar algorithm to generate random dungeons for Dungeons and Dragons adventures.