Introduction to Deeper Dungeons

Very short games can be fun. There’s even an entire coffee-break roguelikes genre dedicated to making games playable in under an hour. Perhaps you’re interested in making a longer game, though.

One way to increase the size of our game is to add additional levels. With more levels, we can step up the challenge of the game as the player progresses. We can also introduce more content. Just be careful not to add too many levels; we don’t want to have more levels than we have game content because players quickly notice when levels feel like filler.

What will we learn?

In this chapter, we’ll add a downward staircase to the first two levels of our game, leading the player deeper into the dungeon. When the player reaches the stairs, we’ll generate the next level, which requires partially resetting the game state.

We’ll also modify the code so that the Amulet of Yala spawns only on the final level. In doing so, we’ll give the player a reason to explore beyond level one. To help keep players motivated, we’ll display their progress on the heads-up display.