How big does a dungeon need to be?

 When it comes to dungeon sizes in games, the differences are vast. From a design perspective, the bigger of a dungeon you create, the smaller the level of detail you can put into each room. I've been experimenting a lot with world sizes in my games. The trick is to make a few rooms seem a lot bigger. But how do we do that?

In a text adventure, the opacity of the screen/text interface means you can hide a lot of lack in the environments by letting the player's imagination fill in the gaps. This also works in pen and paper RPGs. I used that when I designed Choose Your Own CaveVenture: It may seem like you are traversing a huge cave system im my first real roguelike when in fact, every level has a maximum of 12 rooms (usually more like 8-9). And there are only six levels. But the game gives you the feel of being lost in the dark in a vast cave complex. So: Mission accomplished, I guess.

In my board game design experiments with randomizing a dungeon I have made two sizes: 5x5 rooms and 4x4 rooms. The latter is a bit too small, the former seems to be the minimum to form something that actually feels like a maze when looking at it top-down.

In designed spaces you can get away with more condensed experiences. Go ahead and count the actual number of rooms that classic point and click adventures consist of. You will realize that, for example, Monkey Island, has a lot fewer screens than you may be remembering (if you count labyrinths as one screen). My favorite amateur-made point-and-click, Once Upon a Crime, had only 12 screens but you never felt like you did any less than traverse the entirety of a fairytale land several times during play. I used a similar number of rooms when I made The Dare.

My current project is a text-adventure-homage to Resident Evil. It has 34 rooms (if, once more, you count mazes as one room). Yet it feels like you are traversing a huge environment, consisting of three floors of a mansion plus a garden with two side buildings. Of course, I made this with Twine. That means that the actual number of passages is in the low triple-digits for making these 34 rooms. But that includes what I call the "engine" with a combat- and inventory system as well as the actions that you can do as separate entries and all that.

There is of course also the approach of the megadungeon. You can pour however much work as you want into one of these. I like to be cost-efficient though. How many rooms do you need to make until it counts as "mega"? I don't know. I've been thinking about putting a one-page-megadungeon up for the One Page Dungeon Contest. Maybe next year. Maybe.

I've been to some dungeon-like locations in the real world. Most of them aren't as impressive as those of fantasy, of course. What do they need? Three rooms, I say. Enough so that you can't see all of the place from the entrance. That's enough to spark the imagination and the feeling that somewhere around that corner, this crypt/temple/ancient grave might open up to an immense underground world full of fantastical surprises.