Many dungeon-crawling roguelikes treat traps as single-turn events: the player triggers a hazard, experiences its effect, and moves on. This talk explores an alternative approach in which traps and hazards unfold across multiple turns and areas of the dungeon.

Drawing on examples from both tabletop and digital dungeon design, we’ll present a set of reusable patterns for creating these “unfolding” hazards.

Along the way, we’ll highlight procedural generation techniques—including graph-based, multi-pass, and context-aware approaches—that help support more varied and integrated hazard design without requiring a large catalog of handcrafted traps.

Attendees will come away with a practical framework for designing traps and hazards that create more opportunities for player choice, planning, tension, and interaction with the surrounding dungeon.

Cities are beautiful, complex systems that have been built over hundreds, often thousands, of years. Many hands go into shaping a city's character and heartbeat, and most of the work is done completely unconsciously. Street photography is the art of walking into this temporal soup and finding moments of beauty, sadness, surprise and chance, and figuring out how to capture them to share them with others. In this talk we'll take a brief walk through street photography, and talk a little bit about why I love it (and what other, better street photographers have said about it). We'll take some of these ideas and think of cities as procedural generators - and then procedural generators as cities - and talk about how that can help us think about generative and emergent systems in our games in different ways. It'll give you some new language and structure to talk about procedural generators, perhaps give you a different angle to view your own work from, and - I hope - give you the motivation to pick up a camera and head off into your nearest city, to sample its procedural delights.

Games that impersonate other kinds of software have a special quality -they create a geographical space in which the real world and the fictional world of the game intersect, just by referencing the fact that they know you are sitting right on the other side of the screen. Certain fictions feign that they exist in the same world that we do - this book claims to be autobiographical, this footage was found at the scene of the crime, this software was updated moments ago by someone who could still be in the room with you. These meta-referential stories playfully imply that you could be in the same immediate danger as the other characters - your own body and reality are at risk. They do not need to be about the supernatural to have a supernatural quality.

While interface games automatically create this convergence, my recent game work has been about extending the digital interface into tangible spaces, forcing players to use their endangered bodies in ways beyond what is usually asked for by the genre.

The earliest computer adventure games had mazes. Wizardry and Ultima had mazes. The classical roguelike screen just begs to be filled with a maze. Can you say what a maze actually *is*? ... Not as easy as it looks, right?

I'll thread through some classical examples and try to show what very different genres of maze have in common. Textual, graphical, first-person or third-person: what is it about mazes that leaves you feeling lost?

“He looked into the hole, and like any hole it said, Jump.”

— Susan Sontag, The Volcano Lover: A Romance

This wide-ranging but decidedly subterranean 30 minute talk covers a variety of approaches to digital holes in games, as well as the actions of mining / digging / tunneling that cause them. It considers the undergrounds as caught up in varied histories of extraction, labor, devotion, gambling, travel and desire, as well as looks at video game digging across multiple end goals such as "finding treasure", "changing the landscape", or "progressing and moving through the dark". Finally, it considers the subterranean fantasy of buried and alien worlds, where the rules are different than on the surface of the earth– and what that can and has meant to a long history of games that ask you to delve.

We're going to gather disparate threads from Euclid, particle accelerator timing, Marcel Duchamp, music cognition, and minimalism, all in order to build a 100% ethical beat generator.

Terry Riley’s landmark minimalist composition "In C" (1964) asks musicians to play through 53 melodic fragments in order using their own discretion around instrumentation and repetition. This unique approach balances procedural generation with authored intent in a way that can cause, in Riley’s own words, “some quite fantastic shapes to arise and disintegrate.” This talk will dive into Riley’s piece to look at how procedurally generated games with a strong sense of possibility (or “key”) utilize a balanced range of narrative tools and writing styles to make fantastic shapes of their own.

can a good poem also be a good sudoku puzzle? i wanted to make a weird sudoku puzzle that follows nonstandard constraints, and fell down a rabbithole trying to figure out how to do it using python. i'll talk about the constraints, the process, and then do a live sudoku poetry writing demo! which, full disclosure, MAY OR MAY NOT SUCCEED!!!

How do you make sure that the herd of integrated systems that you've gently shepherded into a roguelike game work together into a winnable, playable, balanced, stable experience? Playtesting is expensive, LLMs are expensive and ill-suited, and do you really want to spend your limited time writing a single-use bot?

There is an option that has been used in the board game and simulation world for a long time: the Monte Carlo Tree Search. We'll explore how the surprisingly simple, practical, elegant and scalable algorithm that powers AlphaGo can run thousands of simulations to emulate the smartest character in your dungeon: the player, and show you how your game performs at scale.

We will look at using MCTS simulations to:

• prove how winnable our game is;
• test how hard our game is;
• find the kind of bugs that only appear once in ten thousand games; and
• maybe even apply a scientific approach to balance.

And maybe, we'll see how to turn your Wizard of Yendor into a chess-master: ready to respond to your adventures most underhanded strategies, instead of a mere overpowered goblin who happened upon a massive magical axe.

What does pedagogy have to teach us about roguelike design, and vice versa? In this talk, I argue that instructional design is roguelike design, and vice versa. But these two communities rarely talk to each other, and that's a real shame! In this talk, I'll describe the relationship between the two, and look at opportunities for both educators and designers. What if roguelikes supported players building teamwork skills? What if educators got students to really love failure? And what if designers and educators worked together to create healthy communities and realize hopeful futures?

Localization pipelines for procedural narrative systems pose a fundamental challenge to both developers and translators. Unlike conventional pipelines built around static strings and simple one-to-one substitutions, Caves of Qud's engine must support complex grammatical structures generated dynamically at runtime. This talk will describe the work-in-progress text templating framework that provides a tractable and extensible interface for localizers.

A comprehensive overview of cellular automata, with a focus on rules commonly used by falling sand games (Falling Sand, Powder Toy, Sandspiel, Powder Game, Noita). The talk will additionally talk about technical implementation and common and unique optimizations and quality improvements.

An exploration of push your luck in games through the lens of three games — Blackjack, Skull, and Can’t Stop — how players engage with different kinds of luck, how they affect deterministic and complex games, and how to create and adjust your own push your luck systems.

Interesting use cases for assets and artifacts taking the spirit of kitbashing in to the procedural systems of roguelikes.

In 1993 you could pay two dollars a minute to ring a stranger and ask how to beat a boss. Hint Line '93 put you in that stranger's chair! Players sat at a real operator's cubicle, complete with CRT, Newton's cradle and dead plant, and took calls from furious, confused, tired, and paranoid gamers about games that never existed. Your only help is The Compendium: a physical binder of over 300 pages of manuals, photocopied magazines, decoder wheels and sticky notes from the operators who had the job before you.

This talk covers how five of us built it in two months for a museum.

We invented a game company (acquired six times, most recently by a beef consortium), a console, and seven games designed backwards from one question: what would make someone pay for help? The team interviewed two operators from Sega's real Australian hint line and used their best stories, prank calls included. And we spent most of our time on The Compendium, which needed four copies with identical content but individual wear.

Hint lines were the 1993 version of the wiki and the spoiler file. Centralised, commercial, and run by people barely out of school with ring binders! Learn about Hint Line '93, the bizarre game we built for Melbourne's ACMI museum.

Jay Fenlason's Hack was the first roguelike, released just two years after Rogue. But, the source code and executables were thought to have been lost to the inevitable bitrot that claims so many old computer games. This talk by Dan and Mikey tells the story of how the source code for Hack was recovered, what it took to make a game originally written for the PDP-11 playable on modern hardware, and where you can find the source code and executables. Discover the original roguelike experience!

What does the @ share with the monsters trying to kill it? Why does permadeath feel less like punishment and more like a kind of freedom? How is roleplay identity assembled if you lose your character five minutes into a run? This talk explores traditional roguelike conventions through the lens of queer theory and embodiment. We’ll map these contemporary frameworks onto familiar genre conventions and pull out some surprising resonances. Ultimately, leaving us with a fresh perspective on the conventions we already know so well, and maybe even a little inspired to queer our own design structures.