hmm, dungeon crawller will be fun indeed...

Hi Holden,

consider this:
A game is roughly as good as the sum of its key components. There are great story driven games with average game play, extremely fun games with no story at all but interessting or challenging game mechanics or not to deep games with great art design (grafics/sound).
So if you manage to make a game with that kind of greatness in one of its components it will be worth to play. But you probably won't unless you are a kind of genious.

So this is what I would do:
I would concentrate on one distinct feature and try to make it as good as possible. If it is the genre of dungeon crawlers I'd research all the characteristics of them carefully and really put some weeks into just inventing the core mechanics before actually writing code.
Dungeon crawlers are really easy to write but awfully hard to make them fun to play. Thats because their game play needs to be really well developed. Entombed is quite nice but a bad example for game play nevertheless. It is unbalanced as already said, it is repetetive and it is to random in most cases.
But if you want to be sure that your game won't be a waste of time you should also consider to make it unique in some way. Write a good story for it, try an interessting twist in your art design or come with an idea I don't have That won't just make it a better game in general but also might broaden the niche of possible players.

Don't feel discouraged by this though. I'd love to play another dungeon crawler like entombed. And I think I am not alone.

There's Kirkirkruip, a text-based dungeon crawl with tons of unlockable enemies, weapons, items, etc.  You can download here.
I do agree we need more dungeon crawl games, and RPG games in general. I still have not got a copy of AHC, so I don't know how good it is (or isn't.)

I personally disagree that entombed is so unplayable, bugs only really occur with transformations, though I agree the game has balancing and pacing issues.
That being said I always found it fun to play anyway.

For me a random dungeon crawl is actually a good thing provided you have some control over the randomness. Look at roguelikes like Antband and see how they combined randomness with tactical gameplay. Kerkerkruip did a good job of this too, though that is far less random.

For me the real killer with a dungeon crawl is lack of description.
You can have the worlds most interesting and complex battle system, but if all you get for atmosphere is "you walk into a room, it has a goblin, the goblin has 30 hitpoints you fight, you attack the goblin using yoru sword and do 2 damage, the goblin blocks" etc, then I don't really see much point in continuing, since what exactly is the appeal in encoutering a beholder or a black dragon or a fire imp or any interesting monster if it's presented like a mathematics exercise.

Please! give us something for atmosphere here.

I totally understand your point here. I just want to state that in my opinion the "worlds most interessting and complex battle system" would totally qualify for a really great game. I don't think you really need much more, provided the mechanics are really as great as that.
Think about this: Does your favourite board game has delicately carved figures, a complex background story and a cool sound track? Probably not. The fun part of it are the game mechanics. That can be quite the same with video games.

But I also think every little bit of atmosphere improves a game a lot, don't get me wrong with that. And I also love games with a compelling narrative structure. But I think especially the genre of dungeon crawlers mostly lives from its game play, not its dense atmosphere.

Edit:
Maybe you need to clarify your thoughts about this: Do you want to build an rpg or a dungeon crawler? There are huge differences between those genres, even if they look quite the same.

Someone please create that hell game. Would be really insanely awesome. I do agree we need more diablo style crawlers. Entoomed is, well yeah, unbalanced, and also gets repetitive after like 3 hours of playing. I like that idea of hell though, someone should create that. Also i'd like to point out that I personally prefer audio over text for some reason, so something like kurkurcrub with its text-based world isn't really my think, I prefer games like this with audio driven worlds.

Hi Jayde.
That's wonderful! I'm very happy for you, hopefully we will see another awesome rpg soon!