I forgot what a chore starting an entire new section of the dungeon was. On an entirely different floor. Especially when you have no vision of what that section should look like.

It’s time to wrap up Day 1 by mapping the four remaining rooms and the boss arena.

Building on the successful construction of a single room last week, we’ll double… no triple… no quadruple our output this week. Let’s build another cool cave and then the three rooms that make the Grand Concourse.

I’m surprised that there wasn’t a major revolt last week. After going back and looking what I had done on that ill-fated Saturday night – and what I’d written about it – I was pretty unhappy. That’s why I titled it “Shuffling Maps Around.” It comes from a business term – well, more a bureaucratic…

Saturday night with a White Russian, a Megadungeon Map, a vision, and no idea how to proceed. So, let’s just shuffle some papers around until things become clear. Sometimes, that’s design.

This Megadungeon Monday, we use the power of doodles to add some backstory to our growing dungeon map. And then we use the power of names to put off drawing an actual map for another week.

On this Megadungeon Monday, we finish the exit map we started nine months ago before the Megadungeon project fell off the face of the Earth.

A well-designed, well-paced adventure hangs on the exit map. And designing a good exit map is more about incentives and psychological tricks than it is about walls and doors.

A well-designed, well-paced adventure hangs on the exit map. And designing a good exit map is more about incentives and psychological tricks than it is about walls and doors.

Maps aren’t just maps. Maps are tools for organizing and presenting information. As a prelude to building an exit map, we’re going to organize our information and figure out just what maps our megadungeon needs and who they’re for. Also, we’ll do some mapping.

Here’s a Megadungeon article about why there isn’t a Megadungeon article. Paradoxically. Think of it as a project update and a preview of a very big, exciting development.

Information management is one of the trickiest parts of adventure design. Our Megadungeon has a story to tell. We have to figure out how to tell it. And also figure out what that story actually is.

They say starting is the hardest part. But really, RESTARTING is much harder. Especially if you’ve burn out. So, how do you recover from burn out on a project you used to love? And how do you avoid burn out in the future?

It’s almost time to map our dungeon. By that, I mean, I WANT to start mapping our dungeon. But, like everything else in this giant project, we have to figure out how best to do something before we start actually doing it.

Good game design is about understanding incentives. But incentives aren’t enough. Rewards only encourage good behavior. To discourage bad behavior, sometimes you need to beat someone with a stick.

Encapsulation: the art of designing around nonexistent systems and filling in the blanks later. It’s an important skill, but there comes a time when you have to fill in the blanks. Say, by designing a random encounter system for your megadungeon.

They say “variety is the spice of life.” But that’s because they are dumba$&es. Sometimes, the best thing you can do for a game experience is to impose restrictions and limitations.

For all their clever plans, a game designer can only create mechanics. Create them right and the players will experience the grand plan in all its glory. But RPG designers have a lot of screwed up notions when it comes to this simple truism. They don’t even know what game mechanics actually are.

It’s time to wrap up our tour of the entire megadungeon. And with that, it’s also time to wrap up preplanning and figure out where to go from here.

It’s time to take a whirlwind tour of the megadungeon. What does one think about when one starts sketching out the basis for a huge megadungeon map? Everything, of course. Seriously. We think about EVERYTHING.

From spreadsheet to flowchart to map. It’s time to take that bubble diagram and make it resemble an actual physical space. But figuring out how to do that is tricky. Fortunately, I’m an incredible genius who never ever makes mistakes that result in days of lost progress and an article that basically amounts to “I have no update this week, so let’s spend five thousand words talking about my f$&% up.”

Sometimes, you just have to throw a bunch of work away and start over. And sometimes a bunch of work will just come out of you with no rhyme or reason when you least expect it. Both are as much a part of the design process as anything else.

Before we can start drawing maps to any sort of scale, we need to know what our scale is. How BIG is a room in our megadungeon? Why is it that big? And does EVERYTHING need a size? What even is the point of a map?

You can’t run a dungeon with a spreadsheet. You need a map. And when all you’ve got is a spreadsheet, you’ve got to turn that into a map. But maps take a lot of work.

Settle in kids for the longest, most complicated bit of the Megadungeon yet. Because this is our season one finale. When we’re done, we’ll have our gates and story beats set out on our big ole masterplan and we’ll even fill some of the backstory as a bonus.

It’s time for more Megadungeon spreadsheets. Actually, it’s time for THE spreadsheet. The only one that really matters. The one we’ve been building toward. The MASTER PLAN. And it puts together EVERYTHING we’ve figured out so far. And it’s so big, it’ll take two articles to finish it.

From crunch to fluff and back again. Today, we’re working on the last large-scale bit of planning we need to do before we just start designing the adventure: the plot. And that’s where fluff and crunch come together.

We’ve been focusing on the mechanical structure of the dungeon. But there’s another thing that’s just as important. The dungeon’s story.

It’s time to talk about the second major structural concern of our megadungeon. How do we control traffic and keep people on the critical path? We use gating!

No more spreadsheets! It’s time for maps. Well, sketches of maps. Crappy scans of sketches of maps. We’re talking about planning the Critical Path this week.