5-Room Dungeons and other Dungeons

[Polyedit2000]

Ah, I was thinking of an asylum example too. Oh yeah, speaking of layouts, the next topic is the form of the dungeon.

So if you connect the five rooms in any way, you would get 21 shapes to work with. However, if you remove the shapes that contain any number of loops (connecting at least 3 rooms), you would have 3 shapes: the straight Path, the Arrow that splits at one end, and the Cross with four wings. And when you designate a room as an entrance to one of these shapes, you get 9 forms to work with. From a story-telling point of view, these 9 forms can determine how events will progress:

Railroad: By placing the entrance at one end of the Path, the storytelling is linear as you simply go forward from start to finish.

Moose: By placing the entrance at the second room of the Path, you have one room and a gauntlet. With this design, it is possible to make an element like Puzzle optional or you can preview the Reward before finding the Boss that holds the key.

V for Vendetta: The entrance is placed in the middle of the Path, so you have two equally short gauntlets. It's easy to have the Setback and Rewards at opposite ends (with a harder challenge serving as the Boss).

Cross: The entrance is placed in the center of the Cross. Generally, the entrance will act as a hub.

Paw: The entrance is placed at one end of the Cross, with the Puzzle room acting as a hub. The entrance wing can be used to practice a mechanic that will appear in the other wings.

Arrow: The entrance is placed at the "tip" of the Arrow that goes to 3 room. The entrance can act as a hub, with the "Boss" door blocking access to the Reward.

Fauchard Fork: The entrance is placed at one of the shorter ends of the Arrow. The Puzzle contains a fork, perhaps with the Setback on the other short end requiring you to face the Boss in the other fork.

Foglio's Snail: The entrance is placed on the longer end of the Arrow. The Setback is the fork, having to choose either Boss or Reward without knowing which is which.

Evil Mule: The entrance is placed between the long end and the splitting point of the Arrow. Like the Moose, the Puzzle could be optional, heading straight to the Setback.

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Of course, those are not the only ways to arrange the 5 Room Dungeons. Using a Hauchard Fork as an example, you enter the entrance and solved a puzzle, but then the Setback is that the floor collapses, sending you down to one of the other ends (either the short end to get back to the puzzle room or the long end which includes a boss so that you can resume the short trek to the rewards).

So remember when I mentioned loops? While you could physically connect these rooms for more exploration, I think that they can be used to represent an open space with multiple objectives. An example is in Granblue Fantasy Relink which utilizes the Paw: After going through the desert and finding a switch that opens the ruin, they enter an open field where they need to activate 3 more switches, each guarded by a mini-boss with the center of this area being a Boss/Reward.

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So how would you have the players progress through these rooms? If you let the player choose to visit any adjacent location, they can end up at the Boss/Reward without learning why there is even a Boss or Reward.

Well, one way would be to gate the additional paths until a "key" is found. For Flashlight's example, the door to the break room is a hard obstacle as that may require a keycard that one of the inmates has swiped in the previous wing, and the mess hall could be a softer obstacle since it is accessible but may lack an objective until the employee from the break room agrees to meet there for a discussion over a meal.

Another way is to include a reason for exploration. Zelda: Breath of the Wild does allow players to fight the final boss at the beginning of the game, but it also
encourages players to visit four areas in the story to defeat the Blights which in turn weakens the final boss.