Half-coded engine (Game Maker 8 GMK file) here.I've got most tiles/objects (except enemy/boss types and their AI) finished, give or take an inventory management system; and even a room-filling tile script that takes a grid (8-across, 9-down) that then takes the output (the left side of the room) and automatically flip-copies it to the right half of the room.
The core dungeon generation will take a list of rooms (and some "nulls"), each with one of these scripts, and build a grid of them. The earlier ones will be 30 screens big (6 x 5), and will grow with progression until they're (10 x 9). Each of the stages will have a different set of these rooms, and I do want to design at least 4-5x the amount of rooms (not counting "nulls") in the layout.
Secondly, I'm going to overwrite some of these screens with a set of essential stuff: a floor begin room, a boss/end room, a quad of rooms surrounding a reward item of the level, and results of another shuffled list - stuff like stores, heart container puzzles, that kind of thing.
The "item quad" will have four rooms that co-generate together. One is the item room itself, enterable from one side and exitable via one-way doors from the other sides. The side it can be entered from will be a "puzzle room" - locked from the outside, and the puzzle protects the entry door to the item room. The next neighbor will be the "hint room," where you can discover (or buy) advice related to the puzzle that generates, and the fourth one will be the "solution room" - a room specifically scripted to drop an item (if necessary) related to the "puzzle room." For example, a maze of locked tiles (requiring keys) will result in the solution room dropping 2-3 keys, and a hint of what part of the room to look at to optimize a path through the maze.
The other functions will result in feedback corridors, rather than leaving a long trail of empty space to retraverse, they will naturally loop back around to themselves with switches or mechanisms that promote proper "flow." The boss will drop a warp item, where you can use it any time to move to the next dungeon. And the heart containers/life-ups? I'm putting them in their own puzzle or exchange rooms, apart from bosses - so they're non-essential, but worth exploring to find!
Finally, there'll be two sets of gameplay mechanics in each progression - one of which will occur naturally every 2 levels. But the other ones have to be manually triggered, by solving the game's mysteries; leading to a gameplay experience that naturally gets harder and more complex as the player gets better.
Blastable walls will not be directly telegraphed, but rather they'll often generate an extra object or two - something will look "off" about the room, which will be the hint to look for. That said, I may add a telegraphed tile, and a passive item that changes the sprite to that instead... so that players can learn and catch on, but it'll be quite rare.
That said, I'm going for a 3-spread endgame. One which is just fun to do/complete, for the "easier win." A valid choice, should you find yourself underpowered, and fun enough in it's execution that even pro-level players can enjoy the experience. The other two are considerably harder - one more for puzzle-resource players (with "punishing detours" if you lack the resourcefulness, to keep you from being stuck), the other for high action/execution players (which I suspect will probably appeal most to the hardcore crowd).
Either way, I do want to capture that feeling that victory is fleeting, evasive. I don't want a win to just feel like "game's over now, start a new one?" - I want winning to MATTER. So that even when you know what you're doing, you're still winning at most one out of twenty games; but not by being cheap.
I'm also gonna add invisible pressure plate traps - but I'm not gonna be some cheap bastard that's all "land mine of instant punishment/damage!" about it. That's completely bad design, and probably the part of PokeMon Mystery Dungeon I hate the most. What I -am- going to do with them, is make them like switches that turn on extra gameplay mechanics in the room - corner traps, bouncing fireballs, shooting statues, spinning firesticks, spawn an extra mob or a miniboss, little things like that. Also, stepping on one will destroy all of them for that room (in the likely case they spawn in symmetrical pairs, via object-setting script).
Finally, unlike TBoI (or it's stepcousin Sushi Castle), I'm usually NOT going to force the player to screen-clean in order to progress. Many screens will reward you if you do, but what's the point of a secret item reward for something you're being made to do anyways?
EDIT: "REALLY?"