DUNGEONS

Recommend you look through some of the game design tutorials. They're in the website's Articles section.

I'll save you some effort and link to one of the better ones: Brickroad's Dungeon Theory Article

Mazes tend to have something, I think it's called the critical path or w/e, that is the shortest, if not only route from the entrance to the exit. The fastest way to design a dungeon, let's say of the cave variety, is to start by filling it in with the ceiling tile. Then, in under a minute, draw a critical path that winds to your content. Then draw any other arms that lead to dead ends and possibly any other arms that re-intersect with the critical path. Again, you can do this in under a minute. So far, all of the paths are just narrow, one tile wide. From here, broaden anything you have room to / want to broaden, and fill-in the walls that would be attached to your various paths. Make some number of maps, like 4-6, connect their entrances to their exits, and make a few false exits also on your wrong paths that lead into empty rooms. Finally, fill the dungeon in with all of the fixings, like bridges, broken bridges, bottomless pits, bodies of water, all of the little details like stalagmites and rocks, treasure, monsters, etc.. Occasionally, you can make a section inside map A that is like a tunnel or passage that will bring you to the entrance of map B, and when you walk through the exit of map B, you come out in another area of map A. Often, you may want to draw different levels of elevation within a single map, that involves some climbing of stairs or w/e.

That's the fastest way to generate generic but fine content, and often, your analysis paralysis is going to be what's stopping you from moving forward in any aspect of RPG design. If you look at any mapping tutorial, you'll see that they can draw you a great map in a pretty short length of time. It's all about just doing it.

Then, when possible, try to give your dungeons original flavor / gimmicks. For every aspect of game design, I keep a notepad file that contains every creative idea I've ever had for that area (like one for skill design, one for plot, one for monster design, one for town design, etc.). You can just pull ideas from your notepad randomly or deliberately, or we can list a collection of ideas in this thread, or maybe they're in an existing thread. Three similar ideas I had are 1) a dungeon that is simultaneously being raided by another party, so the faster you raid it, the more loot you get, 2) a dungeon that is being raided by a party ahead of you, and you always see them walking through the exit maybe 15 steps ahead of you, and 3) you go into a dungeon, and sometime later, an NPC comes-up from behind you, and they came from town to give you something or tell you something that might help you in the dungeon. You can have a merchant or even a small village inside the dungeon. Obviously people like to insert puzzles into dungeons, especially of the rock-rolling variety and the lever/switch/button-pressing variety (especially when those switches actually alter the dungeon's floor plan). You can make a dungeon whose true purpose in the grand scheme of things is to get captured by the bad guys mid-raid (unbeknownst to the player). We've seen in the past dungeons where you can only use magic, dungeons where you switch between multiple parties, dungeons that repeatedly take you above grounds and then underground again, dungeons where you gain a party member, dungeons where wearing heavy metal is disabling (due to magnetism), dungeons where your method of movement is in flux (i.e. bridges that appear and disappear, move, retract, etc.), dungeons where you can optionally release an optional boss, dungeons that require finding a secret passage or other secret trick to get past them, dungeons where you encounter an old friend or an old enemy, you can make a gimmick where your appearance is altered for the remainder of the game (i.e. you lose your hat, you lose an arm, you get sick in that dungeon and your skin changes color, hair gets burnt off, etc.), etc..

Wow,you 've seen the subject through and through, would like to see one of your games, sometimes ? The first part really interested me, being really new to game making, it gives a clear method of dungeon designing (as surprising as it may seem to more experienced makers, at first, you can be absolutely clueless in how to map such or such a place : dungeons and forests, in particular!).

I think you fumbled the dungeon link - it shows a non-interactive room with no order of progression.