After a quick break Doyle dives back in and starts to work on the ninth room. A little tricky as in theory the entrance coming from the last room could pop up anywhere. Sure, he could make it so that hole was always in the same place.
Doyle however wanted to keep the feeling of continuity. Anyone that visits the floor should feel that they truly are in a part of an infinite skyscraper. So even if he can, he plans to keep the perceived spatial coordinates the same between rooms.
With that in mind, the question for this room becomes what allows for a random entrance? The answer of course is to break one of the soft rules for the floor. So far even with the rooms that are somewhat connected, they aren’t really. The teleportation twins are both rooms in their own right while the previous three floors were divided despite how interconnected they could be..
A laugh later and he reminds himself that he made the rules so he can break the rules. Plus, he was just reminded of a story he had read and felt like liberally borrowing some ideas from it. So without further ado, he takes four of the rooms and puts them together. No portals to glue it together, just a single actual space.
That ready the next thing to go is gravity. He doesn’t really have any creatures ready for zero g, but the adventurers aren’t exactly ready for it either. From there he adds a few squares of rock as well as handholds all over the place and it is ready. All that is left is to wonder if they realize that up is down. Shame about the author, the shadow was a very formative story for him.
Doyle shakes his core and focuses on the 13th room. He never really felt the number was all that unlucky but his home culture said otherwise. Nevermind the fact that some places even considered it lucky. Still, he feels like including a little extra mindscrew so adds a fifth side to the room.
Mind you, the room is still a square. It just happens to have a fifth side to it. Otherwise it acts just like any other room Though even as a dungeon who can feel how it works his human instincts are shouting at him. If the other things he had done are strange, this one is down right uncanny. Just what he wanted.
The only question is what to do with it. In fact, as he thinks back on it, Doyle can’t rightly remember exactly how he added the new corner. Sure, he could make another square room with an extra side easily enough. All it would take is manipulating one of the sides so that it was twice as long and had a right angle in the middle. Easy!
This room however doesn’t use that technique. As Doyle examines it closer he can’t even tell which four corners are the original ones. Quite the strange experience and he doesn’t want to risk ruining it. That of course leads to a simple enough room.
Doyle can’t exactly add on grass or some such without knowing how it would work. That left the simplest methods of changing things up, a bunch of objects spread around the place. It is a happy coincidence that this adds to the strangeness.
Odd arrangements of furniture made of stone, bone, wood, and glass appear across the room. Not normal furniture though, but rather physically warped examples. Doyle left off any spatial nonsense so as to not interfere with the room. Still, a pentagon shaped bed next to a three legged high back chair creates quite the scene.
After that Doyle shrugs and moves on. Maybe later he could iterate on the idea, but for a single room on a single floor? It can wait. Though he was moderately tempted to turn room 14 into the opposite with a three sided square but soon gives up as he doesn’t understand the five sided square in the first place. While he could cheat it would feel right.
So instead the 14th room is devoted to the theme “hall of mirrors” like you would find in a circus. Except of course Doyle doesn’t deign to use mirrors. Instead he makes use of warps in space. A perfect reflection of not just light, but force as well. It wouldn’t literally reflect physical things like an arrow or a spell, but more because that would require it to start existing in the same space which doesn’t work too well. At least Doyle isn’t able to do it yet.
This doesn’t prevent him from developing a maze that shifts while being explored. It wasn’t even all that hard. Just a matter of turning on and off what was basically a gate that happened to exit the same place you can enter. To be fair though, Doyle made certain that it was always easy to return to the room's entrance.
That’s a joke by the way. In fact, Doyle finds it funny enough to need to take a break and get his giggles under control. If there is one thing more frustrating than getting stuck in a maze, it is the feeling of going in a circle while in a maze. Of course since normal portals aren’t being used they will be able to map out the room. Still, he can’t wait to see the expressions people will make.
There is only one teeny, tiny adjustment that he needed to make before moving on. Apparently there is such a thing as too reflective and Doyle had managed it. He wanted confusion, not nonsense so he toned it down. Now it was possible to tell the edges of each panel so it didn’t look like there wasn’t anything going on.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
Final bits of polishing and dulling done Doyle shifts his focus to the 15th room. This one called for some finesse as the last few rooms had been heavy handed. That meant a plain room with a hidden catch and he had an idea for what to do.
First he placed down a nice covering of soil and grass. A simple feature meant to obscure the ground. Why? Because through the use of his spatial manipulation Doyle had hidden an absurd number of tripping hazards. From a simple hole in the ground and roots to silly things like imitation banana peels.
The entire room was just one tripping hazard after another. Worse yet, at least for any delvers, since it was done through spatial manipulation it was going to be extra hard to spot and any monsters won’t be affected by it. Such a simple design, yet so potentially deadly.
Not that Doyle expects much from it. In theory anyone that has made it this far should have a better head on their shoulders than not. Of course he wouldn’t be disappointed if that turned out to not be the case. The room would instead provide hours of hilarity for him, especially when someone hits the rake. Such a classic slapstick gag.
That leaves the final room. While Doyle doesn't have any specific plans for room 16, he does feel it should be special. The question is how? A simple remix of the previous rooms would be boring and a little bit impossible. As it was he had compacted down the various gravity fields as much as he could so any more would be impossible.
No, for this it needed something unique to the floor. So far there were glass platforms, odd gravity, invisible mazes, a vine climb, a zero g adventure, odd spatial terrain, and a five sided square. Compared to all the previous floors this was already an absurd amount of variety.
In fact, the more he thinks about it, the more annoying it feels. Do this once and everyone is going to expect that is what will happen from now on. The rest of the floor has already been made so no point in changing it now. Then it hits, something special and yet a complete retread of something already done.
The last room was going to be a replica of the first floor. There was barely enough room and he was going to have to cut off a row and column of empty space, but it would be worth it. Even if he copied the monster's whole cloth it would use less than five percent of the floor's point total.
That was just too perfect for him not to do it. Though the fact that a single room on his eighth floor was large enough to contain the entirety of his first floor was a bit worrying. So worrying in fact, that he decided to go and ask Ally about it.
So after being invited in, Doyle brings up his thoughts. ‘So uh, I just realized that my first floor is small enough that I used a complete carbon copy of it as a single room of my latest floor? That reminded me of my time in Flisle’s dungeon and how the place my tutorial was taking place involved a great void with continent sized chunks of rock just floating around.
‘Sure, he had over a thousand floors and what not. However, even now I’m starting to get more space than I expected and it will only get worse. How am I supposed to create these monstrosities?’
Ally smiles, ‘You already used a couple methods that are popular enough with dungeons under a system. There’s the random generator, except of course expanded to include making the content instead of just reorganizing it. Then you used the method of just creating a big block of stone and letting your monsters dig it out for you.
‘Both of those are popular enough, especially the monster one as that also provides amusement for the dungeon. After all, even pre-system your world had stuff like ant farms. This is the same sort of thing but on a much larger scale.
‘Besides those though there are a couple others. If you’re feeling a little too rich you can always pay the system to design it for you. We are however in debt, so just forget that one. Besides, your method of random generation is similar enough and would allow for greater tweaking.
‘Honestly, about the biggest thing holding you back will always be monster creation. You mentioned large floating continent sized rocks? Most of them are going to be bare of monsters, at most hosting some traps. This is partly why some dungeons end up going down the trap only path. It doesn’t work all that well of course, but someone is always willing to try.’
Doyle tilts his core to the side, ‘Why wouldn’t an all trap dungeon work?’
Ally shrugs, ‘Too static. Monsters are alive or at least a good enough simulation there of. A trap is ultimately limited and even if created purely with dungeon rules and such will end up easy enough to detect. All it takes is one decent trap finding skill to make them painfully obvious.
‘Much better is the minimalist approach to monsters. After all, while you do have all that space to use, you don’t have to. Just look at your early floors. Well less than half the floor’s volume is used for the actual dungeon. So yeah, instead of trying to fill a floor with stuff, fill it with stone and only use what you need.
‘Especially useful when you decide to use a bunch of expensive monsters. Though that doesn’t mean you can’t use oodles of monsters. Even if you don’t want to place each monster in exactly the right spot you can have that randomized. Don’t tell me you’ve already forgotten what you did on the fourth and sixth floor?’
Doyle laughs, ‘Fair enough. I guess I do have enough options to handle it. I think I was just a little shocked when the sheer amount of space was smacking so soundly in my face.’
Ally snorts, ‘What face?’
Doyle shakes his core, ‘The metaphorical one that always gets talked about in cultivation novels of course.;
After that they both have a good laugh before Doyle returns to the eighth floor to add some liveliness to it.