Skip to main content

Overview

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 - Keith Ammann's The Monsters Know What They're Doing framework, 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, Pathfinder-inspired rules rather than strict 3-action economy.

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.

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).