4.3BSD/usr/src/games/ddl/sample/sample.ideas
Things to add to sample DDL dungeon:
A point to the whole thing.
A redressing of the Temple to Elbereth. The Tolkien reference
is pointless. There should be more motifs of paganism
throughout the area (which is why the locals burned the place).
In fact, depending on your philosophical/political bent, we
could have the original owner of the house being held prisoner
by the local Calvinists in the church up the road. Your
mission is to rescue him. Your "score" can be used to
purchase some useful item rather than being an end in itself.
The forest and cornfields are pointless. Something should
be done about that.
If the Rescue scenario suggested in the last paragraph is
what's being used, the local church maybe is on the
other side of the forest rather than N units up Highway 8.
The sandy beach should lead to some caverns which ultimately
get you to a large lake. Somehow, the ship should be
removed from the Bottle for transit on this lake. (I'd hate
to Shrink again, tho). For example, maybe the innocent-looking
(but odd-smelling? A clue should be provided...)
lake is really filled with deadly acid, which even burns
through the Bottle. So you toss the bottle into the lake
and suddenly freed, the magic ship grows, extends a gangplank...
Of course, there may be something else aboard, too.
Getting the Globe into those caves should be problematical.
The Glowing crystal shouldn't be the only one that only works
a limited number of times.
Speaking of general tools, what's the knife for?
Beyond the icy lake lives a cavebear. When you leave
your junk lying around for too long on the lake, he comes
by and swipes stuff (driven by a fuse). He leaves footprints,
but finding him and subduing him should be another problem.
Some fillip should be added for him to be more than just
a recostuming of the Pirate.
The riverbed should go somewhere. There's that deadly lake,
of course.
The caverns above the really DARK caverns probably adjoin
the Sandy Beach system somehow.
The Dark Caves should have some point.
It may be a bug that you can take things that you can't see.
The mural really leads to a desert (under some circumstances).
In the desert, the "hwy8" trick can be extended for 2-d movement.
Crossing before thirst sets in should be the problem. A
water-detector (you're getting warmer...colder...right here!)
should be available in the basement. Crossing the desert
should lead to a ruined city, with some stuff, then a road,
back to ... highway 8 ( a *long* way down the road).
More treasure! More treasure! Greed!!!
The wizardly tricks like BEAM should be revealed within the
context of the game to cognescenti.
If, for example, he manages to get through some particularly
difficult stunt (maybe, for example, the preshrunk object
is in turn a key item for some other subtle stunt), he finds
a grimoire that allows him to do a WHERE and BEAM. Maybe
a different magic word only allows him to do this once, and
that's all he gets. Or maybe further stunts take place
in special areas where (1) this doesn't help or (2) there's
no Mana available and his tricks just don't work! Now that identifiers
can be longer, the room names probably want to have better
mnemonic value than the stuff you get from "WHERE".
While each crystal is worth $25, there should be some stunt
that involves using the explosive power of destroying a crystal.
Say, an indestructible chamber in which one of the crystals
is placed. Push a button, and the contents are normally reduced
to powder. Put a crystal in, and the power of the explosion drives
some kind of mechanism/magic that provides more treasure. Or,
now that the crystal can be broken harmlessly, maybe a small
fragment remaining can be placed into some small aperture
that obviously requires a crystal, thus triggering some mechanism.
Some harmless stone or something should be made available to
the player to demonstrate the crusher's use. It's a crock in
even Zork that you sometimes have to die or destroy treasure
to test things out.