Overview

Overview

Overview

Dungeon-Mind teaser key art. "No monster fights alone."

Overview

dungeon-mind is Chris's roguelike (ASCII dungeon crawling, procedural generation, LLM-powered content). The current direction (Sept 2026) is a redesign of the combat and monster ecosystems around two big ideas:

1. Monsters that know what they're doing - inspired by Keith Ammann's The Monsters Know What They're Doing: per-monster-type action profiles with ranked trigger lists.
2. Tick-based combat (PER cycle) - every action is prep / exec / recover on a fine-grained discrete tick clock.

Both inspirations are starting points, not targets. The design is going its own direction and may end up too far from either Pathfinder or Ammann to need direct reference beyond inspiration.

Pillars

• AI-native monsters: action profiles authored ahead of time as data; profiles evaluated in code with a decision table, not per-action LLM calls.
• Readable intent: prep phases are signals in the world; only intelligent/knowledgeable creatures read them. The player and monsters both play the knowledge game.
• Player-paced, deterministic: the world advances only when the player commits; seeded, replayable resolutions throughout.
• Variety without chaos: every run differs (procedural generation plus seeded distribution sampling on monster choices), but monster behavior stays in-character per profile.
• Diegetic and numberless: representations come from the game's own fiction (no cards, no imported tabletop artifacts), the player-facing UI is numberless in the target state (dev builds may overlay numbers behind a flag), and harm is a fixed body plus a scaling avoidance buffer. See Representation and Feedback Doctrine.

Status

• An MVP exists (d20 combat, LLM-driven monsters, ASCII, procedural generation) from earlier in 2026.
• The old repo does not reflect this design direction; treat it as deprecated for now.
• Next step: tick-engine spike (see Roadmap).