My dungeon has a problem of being both too small and too large relative to player and enemy size and area they can comfortably fight in.
What I mean is that the player can travel a lot through the dungeon. At the same time, the rooms are tiny for actual combat. The hub above is pretty much the maximum single room size. There’s a lot of approaches to this and I won’t go into the details of every option I considered.
I am going to add arenas as main gameplay rooms. I will make my current “hub” rooms an internal-only designation for generation and connecting purposes, but spawn them in-game as halls. That way I don’t need any of the hub rooms and I can focus on having the same features in arenas. I do need to modify a bunch of things first before I can full-on remove hubs.
Of course, all the other hub construction steps are similarly lost on arenas. For example, “connect to halls” works, but there is no “connect to arenas step” (can be seen in above screenshot where arena is next to a hub without connecting). Or remove dead-ends should removed hubbed dead-ends too. So I need to add those as well.
Next step is to remove gameplay content (enemies, loot) from hubs and have it only appear in arenas. First, I have to never place anything in hubs. Then convert my content distribution to only have one type of “room” and use far/close flags to distribute loot. All of this is just finicky small changes that take me longer to describe than to do. At this point, I can pick hall rooms instead of hub rooms for actual room placement and just remove hubs rooms from the game.
In fact, arenas are bigger than I ever need them to be (and if I need them bigger, I will make 2×3 or 3×3 arenas). On the other hand, all the other rooms are now irrelevant, as they are all halls and connectors of sufficient size.
My rooms are currently 9×9 tiles big, and I will make them 7×7 instead, which mean there’s a room every 6×6 tiles (as I overlap walls/doors). The actual change is literally a single constant I have for the room size. And since I kept this number adjustable, that’s pretty much there is to it code-wise. I only need to fix the actual room assets, which got their edges truncated.
And the “resized” dungeon looks… well, almost exactly the same. The big change was removal of hubs, but all tunnels are pretty much the same width. The arenas are the only ones notably smaller.
So I think this takes care of the major problem of the dungeon — being inappropriately sized for combat. I may need to invest a little more work into making the arena rooms, but at least I don’t need to make hub rooms any more.