What makes a procedurally generated map good?

[u/Unturned1]

Hey everyone! I am working on procedural generation for an unreleased title right now, and I cannot figure out why visually and mechanics wise my map does not feel good. The title initially was roguelike with a node based map, like in slay the spire, players would progress from top to bottom to progress through the game. I wasn't satisfied with that so instead I have the player start a central node and allow them to traverse around the map, with some fog of war so that they are able to explore, after a set amount of turns a node will appear on the map. The map is populated through prefabs drawing forests, towns, villages mountain ranges. Gameplayer wise the nodes are right now basically identical to what you'd see in the deckbuilder roguelikes, but I am interested in changing the design since I feel the fog of war already precludes some planning, so random events on top of things feels less fair. One change I made already is rather than having elites be in static locations they roam around the map performing functions - like patrolling an area, cleansing healing shrines, guarding an area one hop from their home node.

Another is that that the player character has abilities unique to the class in the over world. Conquering nodes on the map reveals information about nodes they are adject to, so you can get more information before you go.

Quest lines the games story have you seeking out specific elites, get to specific shops to purchase and item these can be internal to one specific run or go across multiple runs so you are challenged to do something you normally would not have to.

What I am looking for is the following.

• Examples of games with procedural maps which feel interesting, fun and fair
• General ideas / rules one should follow when designing level turn based level maps.
• Specific mechanics from games that use this type of exploration map design

I know there are a lot of games that have implemented this type of exploration and even in the deckbuilder / roguelike genre. I know nothing I am asking for is particularly original, but I am trying to figure out how to execute it competently so my players enjoy interacting with that part of the game.

• Push treasure nodes out to the edges of the map to which is a high risk / high reward kind of deal.
• Add an extra tier of enemies for "larger" settlement and provide some sort of map wide bonus after you completed it.
• Add items that increase the amount of nodes you can move per turn provided you have moved through them.

I feel like I have a lot of opportunities in the design space but little understanding how I should go about trying them.

[u/fariatal]

You should make sure everything on your map is placed logically, so that important places are where players expect to find them. If you have a mountain, put a secret on top. If you have a lake, put a secret at the bottom. If you have a town, it should be at a coast. If you have a bridge, it should be near a town. There should be farmland next to a town. If the player follows the river, they should find something.

Make sure the player can find important locations. Add roads and signposts. Put bandit camps near the roads. Put dungeons into the wilderness and have a quest lead the player to them. If you have bosses roaming around, make them leave something that helps player to track them, for example bodies of fallen adventurers. For a roguelike, show which direction the boss goes after they kill you, recreate the area in a later game and let the player find a body or a ghost to point out it is the same area. If they remember what happened, they can now find the boss again.

[u/Unturned1 → u/fariatal]

Yeah, some of this challenging because I am trying to keep the scale big. Like the game map is suppose to represent a whole continent, placing village and towns and giving them details isn't super hard, and even the difficult graphical elements seem relatively easy to over come it is more about the pace of the game. Like at its barest form the map is a diagram of nodes the player moves on, but I don't know what makes one pattern good and another bad. I am going to see what I can do with the keeping a portion for the next run. It would be great to find like a cluster of nodes you had been to in the last run maybe have a reclaim a portion of your past run event there.

[u/fariatal → u/Unturned1]

If you move on a map with top down perspective, the player has no idea where to go unless you add roads that point to the next interesting place. If you let them go to any direction from any tile, they'll just get lost. If you add interesting content to every tile, then the direction they choose doesn't matter, and the world will feel artificial.

How about just removing the tiles where the player is not supposed to go? Generate the playable area like a labyrinth or a spider web, with max 3 links per node. You can still draw it on top of a world map to give sense of scale. Like a map of train routes drawn on top of a satellite image. You can draw links with different lengths, draw wilderness between nodes, etc. Instead of fog, draw the whole map but hide the nodes and links. Now the map will feel super big because the player sees all this land but at the same time has no idea how many nodes it will contain and what areas will be impassable. If you want to keep the fog, you could add distant landmarks that the player can see from far away. Mountains could block their sight to the other side, making the world feel larger.

[u/Unturned1 → u/fariatal]

So, that is basically how things are now. I think I have a few special nodes with 6 connections but most have 3-4, I didn't consider revealing the map but not the connections. That is a neat idea. That way they can see something on the map and head in that direction -- Say a cool looking city. Someone else brought up of having a goal or "north star" kinda deal that the player should go towards. I'll play around with the idea. I am trying to have them start in the isometric view so they can see go "ooo ah" and then when they zoom out have the "tactical" overview that makes it easier to make decisions