u/dualrectumfryer

I am not new to development or RPGs but am new to game dev and building roguelikes. I’m having fun with my prototype but I’m struggling with the order I’m building things. I’ve found myself going down rabbit holes of trying to balance things way too early , but it also sometimes seems that without some semblance of balance , I can’t lock in a core game loop that feels good. I am trying to start very traditional and turn based as well so I’m not exactly in uncharted territory.

For example, I’ve played around a lot with proc gen and my map style. My game is themed around exploration of a city at night where different blocks are different dungeon floors. For the basic map I’m using BSP with WFC to help add variety to the rooms.

But what happens is I have a nice large map with 20 or so rooms, but during my playtests, I sometimes will go to 3 or 4 rooms in a row with nothing in them and it feels frustrating. (Maybe this is just part of the genre lol)

So it’s like, I could make less rooms, or bigger rooms, but what if I like the amount of rooms and want more content in them? And if I don’t want more enemies or treasure than I’m dangerously close to introducing new content and balance to solve a problem and potentially cause a whack a mole of other balance problems.

I know this isn’t supposed to be easy, but I guess my main question is how have people solved exploration feeling boring until you get to a fight or a drop/chest?

I've been using Opus to build a roguelike game. it started off pretty good, and then I made a lot of pivots. (The game started out as a simple puzzle game that was inspired by Rodent's Revenge, then evolved into an action roguelike and is now fully turn based)

I'm starting to feel like even starting with a fresh session every day, there's just so much stale context.

In the design phase I asked it to write a game design doc, but it started adding all the session context to that file, so it grew to a massive size. So we split the file into the GDD, a roadmap file, ideas file, and decision file. But now i have probably 4000+ lines of text in MD files for storing context. (And this seemed to have gotten worse when Opus 5 took over...)

I am not a prompt expert, but I am a software engineer and I've been researching how to build roguelike features like pathfinding / procedural gen, enemy balance etc... and I'm just looking for help to build a game faster, so im not flying completely blind. I specifically made sure the file structure made sense architecturally and the code is readable and has tests (its all in vanilla HTML5)

I like where I'm at with the map gen, tiles, player mechanics and some enemy types, but most of the enemy types, enemy behavior, and items and equipment ideas feel polluted still by the previous 2 versions. I'm providing ideas too, and it always 'flags' something as conflicting with some random decision that I no longer care about. It's started to just become frustrating, not that it cant write the features but that its like pulling teeth to do so.

Would it be crazy to delete all the 'stored' context in the roadmap docs and just have it take a truly fresh look at the codebase? or should I try and clean up the context so i don't lose things?