Currently I don't have to write any map data; all the maps are read-only. This is very easy to work with, at the expense of having monsters respawn when the map reloads.

It's especially noticeable for now because of two things: 1. the current test maps involve backtracking to complete the quest, and 2. I don't yet have something like a "Town Portal" scroll to quickly return to the quest hub. I think it'll be less an issue once the game grows.

I'm considering having bosses stay dead as an optional quest trigger. Though in games like Diablo, continually fighting bosses for treasure is a feature some players enjoy.

Once the game gets more mature and much more content, if monster spawning is still tiresome I'll visit the option of writing recent maps to the user's save file.  If I end up doing random dungeon generation I might have to save maps to the user's save file anyway (unless I just store the seed).

Thanks for your feedback. These kind of gameplay issues are harder to see for me, because I've played the same content a few thousand times by now.

Boss hunting is a lot of fun, and by making bosses respawn you increase replayability.

It would be cool to have a more complex spawning system that is linked into some environmental variable, like phases of the moon. Nethack does this pretty well.

Clint, what is your vision for Flare, what are you trying to ultimately achieve ?

"Clint, what is your vision for Flare, what are you trying to ultimately achieve ?"

Yikes, that's a big question! Let me move this to a new thread...

A few suggestions to decrease the effect of this "problem"

For the mapper

Don't place monsters / treasure near the edges of the map.

Randomisation

Randomise spawning of monsters. This can be done in various ways.

• Instead of 2 goblins, 1d3 goblins (chosen out of 4 variants, with differen rarities).
• Let monsters walk around.

This will change the map each time you play it. Hopefully this will lessen the urge to and make the game more fun.

Technical

Keep the last X maps in (RAM) memory. This works similar to a cache. Before loading a map it looks in the list, if he can find the map. I haven't looked in the source code how difficult this will be, but it might be easy.

Let monsters respawn on the map. This one is quite obvious. If monsters respawn, it is less nessesary to use the trick of going in and out to let monsters respawn. It will also seem more natural, because monsters respawn anyway.

"It will also seem more natural, because monsters respawn anyway."

Hehehe.

Oh, yes, wokste is right. I would just need to keep a few maps in RAM (e.g. just 3 or 4).

Maybe the number of maps kept in RAM can be configurable? I mean, if someone enjoys playing the same map over and over again (or is farming xp), they could set that setting to 0. But for someone who likes clearing maps, they can set the setting higher (maybe no cap?).

As a side note, persistent maps would be problematic if you killed a quest monster before you received the quest. Then when you actually get the quest, you'd go to the appropriate map and find everything dead, including the boss. Then you'd have to travel far away and come back just to reset that map, so you can kill the boss and progress the plot. Maybe there's a way to check if the map would advance the plot before reloading from a cache?

On a larger scale, maybe you just store maps in a similar Area, rather than a number of maps (eg. Averguard Keep vs. The Caves). Then when you left the area (or reset the game) that whole area would be refreshed. Naturally this would require a new variable in the map files, but it could make the persistence feel more unified and predictable.