Ok, so I tried it out.
It seems that once you've played one dungeon, you've played them all. The dungeons just all feel the same.
The variety of gameplay between levels is supposed to come from the differences in the enemies' weapons. As far as generating dungeons with character goes, the cons are that it would destroy the gameplay balance (making some weapons overpowered and others useless), and that the terrain restructuring buttons would destroy the prettiness very quickly. The pros are that the quick destruction of the terrain's prettiness would bring the balance back up to normal quite quickly, and that until then it would be prettier.
So, maybe I'll include a few dungeon generators in the update...
I spent forever trying to get around the hoards of enemies blocking my way just to kill the 10 bosses. It's very hard to tell what's happening most of the time, since there are so many enemies and the tiles are constantly changing.
Maybe I should only give a 1/3 chance of successfully altering the terrain each turn?
I noticed that the tiles that you can "see" light up more compared to the others. Why do you have a field of view if you can just see everything in the level either way? Maybe it's meant for a later version of the game.
Field of vision is relevant for visual-range weapons, which can harm enemies at any range as long as there are no walls in the way. These weapons start to show up around dungeon level 7 or so. Since giving the enemies an AI I haven't been able to get to that kind of depth without dying or cheating (against mindless enemies it only becomes difficult around dungeon level 9). Maybe I should try to make ranged weapons appear earlier (by increasing their frequency or putting less weight on ranged weapons in the weapon quality calculator)?
I personally think that there should be less enemies, but they should all do more damage to the player. This would make it feel more tactical rather than "Hopefully standing here and holding the wait key won't get me killed!"
It's impossible to make them do *more* damage, because they use the same weapons (with the same damage) as the player. But I can reduce the player's HP so that it takes a lot fewer hits to die. I already did that once since the development version (from 110-300 down to 60-250), but I should probably take it down some more. Maybe to 20-100? I might have to rescale damage to make that change viable, because enemies can get big damage weapons very early on.
Same with the enemy count - their numbers were originally unlimited, now they're capped at 80+bosses. I could probably take that down to 40 or 50+bosses?
Other than that, I really like the idea of the game. I don't think I've played a roguelike with the attacks only working based on the combination of tiles around you. I'd love to see more varied levels though.
Thanks for the advice!
I'd like it too if the levels had more obvious structure, but enforcing things like rooms, corridors, caves, chessboards or whatever would necessarily make a lot of the weapons totally useless. This would either screw the enemy and make the level too easy, or screw the player and make the level too difficult (unless the player is lucky enough to find a weapon viable for that layout). Similarly, any nice-looking configuration would be totally trashed in a few hundred turns by all the mashing of the terrain-alteration button (which the enemies deliberately press, even if the player doesn't).
Unless you mean the levels should start off looking pretty and distinct and non-noisy, and should degrade to the chaotic soupy mess over time?
