Pokémon Mystery Dungeon - deconstructing the dungeon generation algorithms
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- Опубліковано 4 лип 2021
- Along my childhood games, there is still a Pokémon game that I haven't ruined by overanalyzing it. This will change today! The details behind Pokémon Mystery Dungeon map generation are surprisingly simple, so let's quickly examine them...
- Ігри
I love how the game gets so frustrated with being unable to generate a valid floor that it just says "screw this, go die in a Monster House."
*I just had a bad time, so YOU'RE going to have a bad time as well! Why? Because I SAY SO!*
~Gee, what a great game!~
ah, fuck it, battle royale time
@@ENCHANTMEN_ Pokémon mystery dungeon battle royale
Has it ever happened to anyone by accident?
@@startheangel9760 it’s probably happened to a decent amount of people, but they would have to be very unlucky
"This was partialy fixed in the DS releases (the fix is that the DS is just faster)" my poor GBA didn't need to be called out like this lmao
this """fix""" made me laugh... yeah. sure. fixed 😂😂😂
My therapist: Tiny Woods Single-Room Monster House doesn't exist.
Tiny Woods Single-Room Monster House:
Perhaps not, but Mt. Steel one room monster house absolutely exists, and you should be scared.
People are still using that dead meme?
@@liamwhite3522 I steamroll over the monster houses
What do you mean dead meme what is even considered a dead meme
Imagine being a speedrunner and getting a monster house in fucking MT. STEEL. even worse: someone playing the game for the first time
Monster Houses don't start appearing until Uproar Forest.
@@CesarTorres61296 The video implies that monster houses will show up in the Silver Trench one-room generation regardless of monster house probability
Tbf that would make for an amazing clip, and let's be real, you would have had to reset the Mt Steel anyway knowing how the dungeon generally goes in runs.
@@icecreamsamwich WAIT WHAT. Oh, that's...not good. I suppose RTDX changed this so that Monster Houses only start appearing once Uproar Forest is unlocked.
@@CesarTorres61296 11:09
They're talking about the failsafe in the video. Not when monster houses will naturally start spawning in dungeons.
However DX did remove the one-room monster houses that did naturally spawn in silver trench
And now for something completely different...
Expect more PMD content in the future!
YEssssssssssssssssssssssss I wondered how they generated the dungeons so nicely for so long, even tried writing my own routines to emulate it, thanks for this video! And your take at the beginning isn't controversial in the slightest everyone who played those agrees they're superior to the mainline games don't @ me
Yoooo! I didn't know you were an MD fan! I've been following you for ages! Idk if you are aware of the advancements in the ROM hacking scene, but it'd be amazing if you wanted to join our group! Having someone as skilled as you around would be super helpful! :D
Yes please and thank you! PMD has needed some real low level examination all this time, glad to see it finally get the attention the series deserves!
I also like the mystery dungeon games more than the mainline games.
This is a very welcome change.
LETS GOOOOOOOOOOO
All right, one more comment from me. To start, the bit at the beginning about liking the Mystery Dungeon games more than the mainline series I have to say I completely agree with. I grew up on Pokémon games, but the ones that really left an effect on me emotionally are the Mystery Dungeon games, especially Explorers. The writing is absolutely fantastic, sorry is compelling and leaves me really caring about the characters.
So true!
To this day, I cannot listen to "Don't ever forget" without crying.
@@Metalocif true, I think the only one sadder than that is the partner theme from the fourth game, but then again I haven’t played the second one in years
Yes. I love explorers.
Another MD preferer over the main series... That might be the fact that my first Pokemon game was PMD Blue rescue team. XD
I actually recognize generator 0x05 from my times playing other Mystery Dungeon games - that's one of the possible generations in Shiren the Wanderer. It's not seen in the main storyline, only in the bonus dungeons.
The big room with the monster house is usually a themed monster house which is way deadlier - instead of filling it with monsters from the floor you're on, it selects a theme, like powerful monsters, monsters with ailment attacks, ghost monsters, etc. and puts them all in there, using all three possible levels. It's why all of the monsters were already generated - in Shiren, monster houses generate with all monsters already placed, but asleep, and entering the monster house wakes up all monsters on the floor.
Usually running into this sort of room setup meant that if the stairs didn't spawn in the non-house room, you were screwed, since third-level monsters could very easily wipe the floor with you even up to the 50s. Countless times I've entered a seemingly normal room only to see "It's a Power House!" and immediately took a boulder to the dome for 200+ damage.
7:54 This is used in Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer for the Nintendo DS.
I feel like it just bailing out to a monster-house if it fails a floor too many times is because the giant monster-house generator has no chance of failing to generate itself, so the game won't ever get caught in an infinite loop.
yeah, but the line or plus arrangement wont fail either-- even with nonstandard rng deviations the lack of dummy rooms means that there's always a strong connection
It's probably a leftover from testing, if you get 10 invalid attempts, you're doing it wrong kind of thing
Man, these games are not getting enough tech talk, thank you so much for this.
I don't think the starting opinion is controversial at all lmao
if you're taking the time to watch the entire video, it definitely isn't to you!
Oh, definitely; the Mystery dungeon series is far higher quality
@@marz8386 agreed, specifically in the writing departement. like when do you actually cries playing a main series pokemon game, only real man cries playing PMD
Mystery Dungeon on Switch is the first Pokemon game I've bought since FireRed/LeafGreen. I have to agree.
A more controversial one would be saying that i prefer Gen 1 over the others....
Me.
The generator 0x05 reminds me from "Shiren the Wanderer" (also made by Spike Chunsoft) on the SNES which actually used this Room.
Since Shiren was the first MD game, I would be really surprised if the engine wasn’t similar - even between PMD DS & Shiren DS.
@@endymallorn Shiren was actually the second, the first was a Dragon Quest spinoff about Torneko from Dragon Quest 4, strangely we only got the second Torneko game in North America, on PS1. Shiren DS is a remake of the first Shiren game for SNES, but there's also a few other DS ones, the only other DS one to get localized was Shiren 5, which only got localized when it was ported to Switch/PC, which is the second time that one was updated and rereleased.
But yeah there are some artifacts from the Shiren games in the DS PMD games, I commented about this in one of the other vids, but the PMD exclusive moves Wide Slash and Vacuum Slash are from the Shiren games, down to the animations, and the behavior of being able to pick up money by dashing on it and swapping is actually a real dev-intended mechanic from the Shiren games, just purposeless in PMD. In Shiren you can throw money to do fixed damage, or pot shenanigans. A lot of the items also have equivalents to some capacity that share animations, such as most PMD seeds/berries corresponding to Shiren grasses/herbs, and most PMD orbs corresponding to Shiren scrolls. Most of the held items are also renamed but shared between games.
Despite that, the games feel quite different to play, and most Shiren games usually have a bunch of unique mechanics or new spins on mechanics. Such as Night Mode in the later games, and surprisingly deep and interesting crafting mechanics involving using enemies as living cauldrons. The Shiren games are overall harder but encourage very creative item abuse, in true roguelike tradition. Similar to Nethack, it's entirely possible to just, get out of any situation with the right items on hand.
I'm designing my own Mystery Dungeon game, so I suspect that this video will be not only entertaining and educational, but helpful specifically for that as well.
Thanks in advance.
Technically, there IS a chance that someone's luck is so bad that every floor is a one room monster house.
It may not happen in this timeline, or the next, but somewhere out there, someone got so boned by RNG that they drop the game by the second dungeon for being too hard.
(Sorry to mislead a bit, I know it's not actually possible to have it happen every floor, just wanted to meme a bit)
I wonder if you could brute force through the rng to see what combination of inputs would cause that...
well, not entirely. the problem with getting into extremely tiny values of RNG like this is that there are a limited number of RNG states the game can be in, and "every floor is a monster house room" is probably rare enough that *no* values of RNG exist that can cause it.
Thankfully, some of the algorithms can't generate disconnected maps, so they could only be screwed over so much (still though).
It's not the same, but I got 2 Monster Houses in a row in Lugia's dungeon. I'm glad I had a Charizard with Heat Wave to save my bottom.
I played Red Rescue Team like 300 hours and it never happened to me.
I love this video, it's like my childhood "Mystery" has been unlocked. Especially "small" stuff like 17:18, finally explaining why there were so many wonder tiles all the time, it's bloody satisfying for some reason. 441-0 like dislike ratio is insane and deserved.
It's 909-1 right now!
Who would do such a thing
@@duetopersonalreasonsaaaaaa The consistency is still going how insane
When I played this game when I was a kid, I learned that a lot of wonder tiles = moster house, as you, now I know the reason
The Tiny Woods with 200+ dead ends is just what it feels like to go back to the old games after playing RTDX.
As usual from your channel, this video was everything I ever could've hoped to learn about the topic in a very easy to digest format. Love your work dude :)
It's not a controversial opinion because the Mystery Dungeon games ARE better than the mainline games.
True.
I have no experience with them but I gotta say the music here gives me a fuckin headache
who decided to make a song where every instrument is an off tune whistling noise
@@ENCHANTMEN_ idk blame the gba. The Blue Rescue Team versions sound much better.
Except for Pokemon Emerald, totally agree. I prefer much more the Mystery Dungeon series.
this is so interesting even the inefficiencies with the map generation
I think i can see how the 0x05 could be useful for testing. A simple layout with a monster room you know you find either by spawning in there or entering it, both situations that are rare in the base game and sorta out of the way to test otherwise.
my favorite genre of videos: generation algorithm teardowns!! thank you for putting in the time for this cool deconstruction
I genuinely think ive seen the one room monster house in mt steel before. Terrifying
Outstanding video! As a PMD speedrunner and someone who has also made an implementation of the dungeon algorithm for a school project (lol), it's great being able to see the steps propely visualized alongside everything else. Definitely looking forward to more pmd content!
Kid me was right! I noticed the "rooms on the outside with hallways in the middle" layout in a couple of the dungeons in the dark future in PMD2 as a kid, and I was right that something was up with that! I presume that means PMD2 uses a similar algorithm?
Yeah! Every single normal algorithm seems so familiar, especially those late-in-the-story dungeons like the one you mentioned. This truly makes a lot of sense.
Holy! This algorithm is something I've been super interested in learning about for years. Explorers specifically, but best I can tell it's the same algorithm. My gut feelings were right on some things, like how it uses 1x1 dummy rooms. I never got very far with my own research though.
This is really fascinating! Once you get to the late game you start recognising patterns on the floors (especially when you have to do the same dungeon multiple times) but I never realised how clever the algorithm is!
YES Mystery Dungeon Reverse Engineering! What I've been waiting for, there's no one that seems to care as much and I know you'll figure out extraordinary stuff! 🥳
In Explorers there is an added step to make sure that all rooms are connected, instead of throwing the map away entirely.
Dungeon generation can still fail in Explorers, though usually not because of the connectedness test iirc. It's a lot rarer as a result, and doesn't feature Monster Houses (at least in dungeons that don't naturally have them, like Apple Woods), but it can still happen. Another wrinkle that wasn't brought up here: if generation fails on a mission target floor, the mission is unclearable because none of the mission-related mon spawn.
@@mandl2710 Had that happen as a kid, had to deliver an item to an Elekid. I wandered around til the wind killed me, there was no Elekid.
really interesting how the dummy 1x1 rooms are used for intersections pretty often.
Good vid, you explained things well.
Also a Monster House on Mt. Steel terrifies me
a game i have wanted to understand better forever, thank you so much
Yeah, awesome video. I ALWAYS wondered how the map generation worked, and you explained it so perfectly. Thanks!
I love this analysis of the map structure algorithms. PMD is one of my fave games when I was a kid and played it a LOT back then. I always thought that there was some sort of pattern with the map layouts which is why I sometimes think that if I see a certain pattern with the paths or room shapes I would have an idea where to move to get to the exit asap. Now it really makes sense. The reason why I had that gut feel with the maps in PMD was due to the algorithms you mentioned in the video. There's basically a pattern in the map generation.
YES! Glad to see Pokemon Mystery Dungeon getting some loooove!!!
Thanks for covering PMD and hope there'll be more videos on this topic
Dungeon generation in these games is really interesting to think about. I don’t really understand all the technical stuff in this video but I understand enough of it to find it interesting
Especially the failsafe monster house lol
Really interesting information and a good breakdown of the algorithm.
The RNG is surprisingly simple, might include it in my RNG collection :P
Few things:
- How is it determined which room will be the shop/monster room?
- How are the numbers from the RNG used to create the level layout?
- I guess the end was a teaser, as it makes no sense in the context of dungeon generation. I'm looking forward to it
Always so insightful, this game and Explorers have made me cry and seeing it get deconstructed always makes me feel excited about how it works.
It's funny how a different coat of paint could get so many people into roguelikes back in the day
I thought you had to lose all your progress upon dying in a roguelike...am I missing something?
@@yosoyysoyyo Not all genres follow a strict set of rules it meets more than a few that you find in most other roguelikes. Besides, it was directly inspired by rogue in the first place
This was absolutely fascinating, looking forward to more PMD content!
11:25 Ah, the explaination for my irrational fear of that dungeon as a child. That happened once and never again, but I was always afraid it would.
That was very complete and instructive, thanks a lot for taking the time to do this ! :)
This was really interesting, thanks for putting this together.
Absolutely stunning that you've uncovered all this and put it in this engaging video for everyone to learn for free. I had a lot of fun watching!!!
YESSSSSSSSSSSS finally more mystery dungeon videos I've been waiting for so long
Fantastic video! Thank you for putting the time into making this.
This video is AMAZING!!!! I love this series so much and always wanted to know more about how the generation actually works, thank you SO MUCH for making this!!! :DDDD
Thank you for making this video. I really wish there was more behind the scenes content on the PMD games like this.
Incredible video on this! It's fascinating how they are constructed and you did a great job deconstructing it in a understandable form!
I'd love to see more PMD content in the future, please keep it up man !
I want to make a mystery dungeon like game and this is actually super helpful and informative! Thanks!
completely agree this game is fire, from the soundtrack to the mechanics. thank you for making this video!
Good stuff, looking forward to you tearing apart more PMD games with future videos
These deconstruction videos are so interesting!! Also, I appreciate you leaving the text on the screen long enough to read without having to pause the video 🙏
Just got back into Blue Rescue Team the other day, great timing lmao
I love this video, I've actually contributed to the pret decompilation for this game. Reverse engineering is fun.
First off this is a really good and well made video. Many props to you because Mystery Dungeon was a big part of my childhood. I had no idea how complex this was
Second, I think 0x04 is used in the Explorers games. The layout reminds me of a few dungeons when your in the future. (I think in Chasm Cave?)
Thrid, I love how many "failsaves" the game has. Fail to generate a room 10 times in a row? Have a monster house! Generate ??? Type hidden power 100 times? Here's fire type.
And lastly, I would love to see a video explaining some of the unused moves/moves that trigger orb effects.
This is an incredibly cool and informative video, fantastic work!
I'm actually surprised attack AI and enemy AI are affected by the RNG seed, I always imagined there was pathfinding of some sort that wouldn't need RNG. That'd be an interesting video to see a full explanation on!
Pokémon AI has some randomness, like deciding whether to turn at a junction, choosing which room exit to go to after entering a room, and choosing which move to use.
If you're interested, about a month ago I made a video on how partner/enemy AI works.
This was one portion of my childhood I never really thought about, but I'm glad I finally know now!
At 9:35, there's an unreachable room(1x1 dummy), which should be an invalid layout. Instead, it's deleted. What's up with that?
Nice vid! I'm 80% they reused the algorithms for the ds, and the switch, but Super has funky floors that don't fit these categories.
at a guess the "strongly connected" check only ensures that all the big rooms are connected and throws out dummy rooms if they're invalid? since on maps that are like 80% dummy rooms it could increase the generation time by like 5× if all dummy rooms had to be connected
I asked the same question and I found the answer when I started to attempt recreating the dungeon generation algorithm, so here's the explanation, copy-pasted from my own comment :
"Turns out every floor in a dungeon has a 'connectivity' value that tells the game how many connections it should generate on that specific floor.
This leaves some rooms unconnected, and every dummy 1x1 room left unconnected will be deleted in the step immediately following path creation (this is what happens around 9:40 and 10:05, the deleted 1x1 rooms were actually left unconnected because the floor's connectivity value was not high enough for the game to reach them, thus why they end up getting deleted after all paths are created)
Explorers of Sky actually improved on this system by using this step to attempt connecting unconnected rooms to adjacent connected rooms, saving a lot of the maps that would be candidates for yeet in BRT/RRT, however unconnected 1x1 dummy rooms still get deleted the same way."
@@samario7935 In a way you were kinda right, the game only checks for unconnected big rooms and doesn't look at unconnected 1x1 dummy rooms, but that's because they all get deleted before the 'room verification' step-
Not rescue team, but when I was doing a randomizer of Explorers of Sky, I made it to Mt Bristle (or as the randomizer called it, Hilarious Backwater). No matter how many times I entered, the first floor was always two big rooms, one of which was a monster house. I assume that Rescue Team and Explorers use similar, if not the same algorithms for dungeon generation, and I just happened to get 0x05.
It took me ages to get to floor 2, only to find out that floor was the One Room Monster House (0x02). It took so many attempts to get through, I was beginning to think that the randomized title for chapter 3 (Final Chapter) was accurate. Luckily, I got to floor 3, beat the rest of the dungeon easily and beat up the boss Rattata.
Mystery Dungeon is fun.
LOL. I didn’t know there were randomizers for these games, also I’m pretty sure the pmd2 uses a lot of data from pmd1
I've always wondered for years about how the PMD games' procedural dungeon generation worked, and I'm glad I finally have an answer to that question!
Thank you so much for finally answering my questions, although I'm glad the theories I made on it all over the years were mainly true!
This was very informative thank you for this;
I look forward to seeing more mystery dungeon content
I am a game developer who is currently creating a PMD fan game at the moment. I have all ready found some documentation of how these games generate their dungeons but this? Nothing like this. From the bottom of my heart, I thank you for documenting how dungeons are generated in a nice easy to follow way. Thank you so so much! It makes my life so much easier! :D
After getting my memory refreshed about your brute-forced passwords vid by recently seeing a vid on the Justin Bailey code in Metroid, I'm so glad to see you're still uploading stuff!!!
The king has returned...
I sunk a lot of time into Explorers of Sky/Darkness and a lot of these layouts feel very familiar
This is a highly curious and necessary video deserving of more attention! I wonder, considering some quirks are present in red and blue here, how algorithms might have been altered in later installments... nonetheless, witnessing the generators and everything in work bridges the gap to seeing how several general floor types can come to be, as I'm sure some have noticed a handful of these through extensive play
19:20 that really was a mobile scarf huh
i laughed but i'm not happy about it
top quality content as always
keep up the good work
Very cool video, I played these games a lot when I was younger
Enjoyed this a lot! I look forward to more of these then!
This was great!! Thank you for breaking it down like this :)
The OOB-preventing warp is actually really clever
0:00 Totally agree. No questions.
I'm looking forward to having more of the Good Content™ to inject directly into my veins!
As a matter of fact, I've been working on a roguelike game on my own and I've used this video as a reference on how to make the map generation algorithm.
Great video! I love PMD and see how the game works behind the scenes is always fun. I wonder how the game works with rooms that need to generate specific items such as friend bow.
Damn, now this is some content I love to see
This is so so interesting! I always wondered how they generated the dungeons, and I never expected it to have been done exactly like this with several algorithms. I guess it kind of makes sense though, as it allows for more variety and combining them all into a single algorithm might be messy. I wonder how different/similar the algorithm is in Explorers of Time/Darkness/Sky.
Also, the game ending up generating a full room monster house if it fails to generate a valid dungeon 10 times is kind of evil, thank god it seems to be very very rare lol
amazing video. I forgot how much i love pmd music
I'm so glad the community of this game is still so alive and kicking
Can’t wait for more Mystery Dungeon videos :)
I too preferred this series of games more than the mainstream one!
In the end, when you mention the storyline and stuff, you forgot one BIG thing that made us love those games: the ost :)
i've been wondering how the dungeons generated since i first played these games. great video!
Amazing video! Thank you so so much for making this
It’s almost that time of year again
Awesome sauce, my favorite childhood game!
i love this channel so much
It's not much, but it was all that was needed for a game of its time. After playing the everliving shit out of this game, you tend to start noticing a bit on how the algorithm works, but still, it's cool to see it all laid out and how everything works together. Thanks for deconstructing my favorite game of all time.
When the map generation algorithm 0x04 hits u know shit's getting real
Saw that opening line and immediately liked the video
There's a hard item limit, huh? I know there's a limit on how far away a thrown item can drop before it can't and just gets deleted, but that one is new.
This is really cool, thank you for doing all this research into how the dungeon mapping works. I wonder if EOS and the other two use a similar LCRNG, or if they use something more unpredictable? it seems to me like there isn’t any sort of initial seed generation for red and blue rescue team, but there might be something like that for the exclusively DS titles
Btw, if you aren't already planning this, I need you to deconstruct the codes you use to save yourself from a dungeon you fainted it. I'm immensely curious how those generate.
Please make more videos like this one!
The controversial opinion here would be if you liked the pmd series but liked the mainline series even more. Thanks for this in-depth analysis, I remember wall items being a thing but never knew there were bananas!
Duuuuude I was waiting for a long time to watch the composition of a Mystery Dungeon game! Since I heard that you were too lazy to investigate it after that randomized dungeon you did :b
This is helping me so much in my attempted recreation of a dungeon. If I might ask: could you elaborate on how paths are made between rooms? I'm not understanding entirely 😅
So cool. I always wanted to know how dungeons worked. And some day I would like to make a game like pokemon MD.
top-notch video
this is so cool!! will you be covering how wonder mail works as well?? been playing blue rescue team lately and i wonder how mail is generated/what characters mean which dungeon/reward/etc