MECHANIC NUMBER 93!!! by the wizard... Mr. Boura

The brains at "squidi" came up with a very interesting idea of a collectibles Zelda type game. I didn't read over the "player cards" or "town cards", but I was quite intrigued with the idea of the "dungeon cards". Cards represent a possibility within the collectible game. The more cards you have, the more variety there is. Procedurally generated, everything from player appearance to dungeon layout is based off of your "deck".

The concept is actually really cool. The idea that EVERY TIME you play this game, the dungeons could be completely different, the towns are completely different, and the players will be completely different is awesome. The creators did seem turned off by the idea of creating tons and tons of content that, because of statistics, might never be used, however, if they made the game customizable, people could create their own "cards" and see them implemented in the game.

The dungeon cards vary in a few aspects. There are "seed" cards that define a specific algorithm or formula used to generate the dungeon. There are floor plan cards, that define the basic shape the dungeon will resemble when the rooms are placed. There are theme cards, such as fire, earth, water, etc. And then puzzle and room cards, puzzles being obviously different puzzles, and room cards being random rooms with baddies and maybe a rock or river.

The dungeon generation will reflect the cards already picked. If the theme "fire" is picked, then mostly "fire" monsters will be used. If the dungeon used a specific puzzle once, it wont use it again in that dungeon.

The creators also showed a little hesitation with tool based rooms, IE, you have to have the hook shot to get past this one room. The idea would work easily, because they lay out the dungeon in a "tree" and it would be easy to check if the hook shot rooms are AFTER the room in which you get the tool, but they felt it would get too confusing and overwhelm them. I disagree. I think that would be essential to create interesting dungeons or else it will get redundant even with the random generation of rooms. Think of the possibilities, creating rooms in which you have to have BOTH the hook shot and the lamp, BUT you can only get one tool per dungeon. The order of dungeons can be random, so the variety is nearly endless.

I love this idea. I think its amazing and would love to see it happen if not help make it happen. I know that the process would be amazingly hard, but I think this would be amazing especially in 3d rather than a 2d Zelda game.

http://www.squidi.net/three/entry.php?id=93