I think we agree that the dungeons that require “collect 2 things and bring here” are somewhat tedious, and respawning mobs won’t really help that (in fact it will slow you down!)
To me the solution is simple, looking at clasic Zelda games for inspiration.
The room to which you need to bring the boxes has 5 doorways:
- The one you enter, which leads from the dungeon entrance itself.
- Two leading to adjacent rooms which contain the boxes, but behind sealed doors.
- Two leading to different paths that snake off to these rooms, but once the room is cleared, and the box collected, the door opens and you immediately reenter the main room, place your first box, and head out the other door to do the same via the other, as yet unexplored pathway leading to the second box room.
No backtacking, simple design, the core room forms the centre, with 3 paths:
- One of which leads from the dungeon entrance to the main (core) room
- 2 which circle back to the main room (via the box rooms, which, in case you missed it, are immediately adjacent to, but blocked by a one-way door).
This allows for the randomised content to be the three corridors, with two being loops back to the adjacent rooms.
Am I missing somehting, or is this not the simplest way to fix backtracking?