Dev Blog #2 (The one about Lava Bees!)

Hey Game Fam, we’re back with week 2 of our development cycle on the Mega Dungeon Generator. If you want to see where we are after last week, check back here or here, and get yourself refreshed. If you’re completely new, I suggest you check back at the links above to get an idea of what’s going on. This is a look at the design and development of your very own Mega Dungeon using my Mega Dungeon Generator. Let’s dive in.

So, here’s what the Map looks like from last week. (Link). We’ve designed the entryway and have two rooms connected by corridors to that main entrance. Let’s get to designing those rooms. For ease of identification, starting this week, we’ll put numbers on the rooms.

Room 2:  

# of Room Shape Structures? 1 Room Shape: Hexagon

Room Size: 5 x 5

Shape Inconsistency: None

Ceiling Height: 30 feet

Room Oddities: 3 (Illusory Auditory Effect, Larder, Hole).

New Doors Out: 2 (One South, One South East)

Okay, those are the mechanical nuts and bolts of Room 2, but how are we going to frame this? Hexagonal rooms make me think of a) Battletech, and b) Bees. Battletech won’t help here, so let’s lean into Bees?  

I see this room as a vertical hexagon like a honeycomb, with small honeycomb structures built into the walls horizontally, stacking on each other. Whatever lived here before the eruption (and I’m really leaning into Bees of a disproportionately colossal size) used this room as their primary food storage. There’s an illusionary Sound Effect in this room, and I honestly like the bee theme, so I think it’s the soft sound of buzzing, like a group of bees.  

The room also has a hole in it, and that’s a symptom of the Eruption. A small magma channel runs underneath this room, and when the eruption happened, it erupted some place else, but the pressure and the movement of the lava opened up a small hole in the room. That hole still has warm magma under it, and it’s a natural hot (not dangerously hot) spot in the room.  

(I really like this dungeon so far)

There are two doorways out of this room, one on the south face of the Hex, and the other on the southeast (bottom right) side. I attached them to the corridors. The South corridor is only 2.5 feet wide (which means characters have to work to get through) but is 15 feet long. It has no oddities. The South East Corridor is 5 feet wide, ten feet long, and has no oddities.  

Room 3:  

# of Room Shape Structures? 1 Room Shape: Hexagon

Room Size: 1 x 1

Shape Inconsistency: None

Ceiling Height: 10 feet

Room Oddities: 1 (Wall Trap).

New Doors Out: 2 (One North East, One South East)

Continuing with the Theme of hexagons and things, this is a hexagonal room that’s 5 feet by 5 feet. The ceiling’s only ten feet high. This is a much smaller room than either of the other two. Of hilarious note, there’s a wall trap in this room. I’ll note that for when I customize this for a system, but right now there’s an unidentified trap here. Also, we have two doors out of this room.  

Room 4:

# of Room Shape Structures? 3 Room Shape: Circle, Oval, Circle

Room Size: 1 x 1, 4 x 3, 1 x 2

Shape Inconsistency: None

Ceiling Height: 15 feet

Room Oddities: 4 (Pool of Liquid, Fresh Water, Supply Cache, Fungus).

New Doors Out: 1 (One South)

Okay, those are the mechanical nuts and bolts of Room 4. This room is a little different. We’ve got two different liquids (one of which is a fresh water supply), a supply cache, and Fungus. Huh, this should be interesting. There’s two small circular rooms, and a large oval shape. So rather than embrace jocular humor, let’s put one sphere at the end of the large oval, and the other one along the bottom side (it’ll look better on the map). 

So, in the larger of the two circles, I’m going to put the pool of liquid. I choose Lava as the liquid in question. Remember, this room is small enough that combat shouldn’t happen in it, and as a result, I feel safe putting a literal death trap in a dungeon designed for low-level characters. In the larger oval, the Supply Cache and the Fungus live. The Fungus is a small mushroom forest that’s taken over with the help of the magma fumes (the fumes aren’t bad enough to impair characters, but the mushrooms love it). The Supply Cache is a collection of adventuring gear from someone who’s been in here before. They left it here because the mushrooms are doing a pretty good job of keeping it safe and hidden. The Fresh water supply is a hot spring in the smallest of the circle rooms. There’s one door out of this room, set on the southern half of the oval wall. The Corridor for that door is 5 feet wide, 15 feet long and opens into another room.

Room 5:  

# of Room Shape Structures? 1 Room Shape: Octagon

Room Size: 4 x 4

Shape Inconsistency: None

Ceiling Height: 30 feet

Room Oddities: 2 (Natural Lighting, Altar).

New Doors Out: 1

Room 5 has two key features, a source of natural lighting and an altar. Otherwise it’s a fairly normal octagonal room that’s 20 X 20. The Altar dominates the center of the room (whether it’s tended by someone is something we’ll figure out later) with a pulsing lava core that illuminates the room. The lava “Lamp” is a little warm, but not dangerously warm. There’s 1 double door out of this room, which attaches to a short corridor to the next room. There’s a Gate in the middle of that corridor that will have to be opened to allow further progress.

Room 6:  

# of Room Shape Structures? 1 Room Shape: Hexagon

Room Size: 3 x 3

Shape Inconsistency: None

Ceiling Height: 10 feet

Room Oddities: 3 (Statuary, Glyphs and Writing, Ominous Warning).

New Doors Out: 1 (One East)

Room 6 is a statue gallery. There are 6 statues of people important to whoever built this place originally, one set against each of the walls. There was writing on all the walls at one point, but the lava burned away most of the right on the two upper walls. The two statues survived intact. There is a warning carved into the floor about a mysterious danger deeper in the area. The Corridor is 10 feet wide, fifteen feet long, leading to the next room.  

Room 7:  

# of Room Shape Structures? 1 Room Shape: Square

Room Size: 6 x 6

Shape Inconsistency: None

Ceiling Height: 15 feet

Room Oddities: 3 (Garden, Helpful Dungeon Feature, Artificial Lighting).

New Doors Out: 2 (One South, One South East)

So, this is an interesting confluence of random dungeon features. It has a Garden, which is full of flowering plants (and a few small fruit trees). There is an artificial light source in this room to provide “sunlight” and there is a natural irrigation system (probably tied into the freshwater source in the adjacent room) to provide water. At one point, the original builders of this place probably tended this room, but now it grows wild. There are two doors out of here, one of the south wall and the other set in the east wall.

Recap:

We’ve used 9 of the 21 doors that we generated for this level, and this place is interesting. There’s a temple, some statuary, a garden and LAVA. I think I’ll call it here for today, and we’ll catch back up with you next week. Next week we’ll keep filling in the map and adding more rooms. Once that’s done, we’ll start figuring out a population and some other encounters for this dungeon.  

If you’re interested, you can always pick up your own copy from Itch here. See you next time and keep having fun playing games, Game Fam. Remember to check out the map in progress here. I use Inkarnate, mostly because it’s about as sophisticated as I can get without getting deep into the weeds.