Though I much prefer hand-drawing things out, I do like the app! The simplicity of it is nice.
Cheers. I wrote that when I was learning vb2, so about 1993? I took a look at the code last night and was shocked at how clever some of my coding was and was also shocked to see how little some of my style has changed.
For the updated version, i'm thinking of keeping the same basic premise of selecting a room/corridor type, and clicking on the map to add it, with curved lines, and customs room/corridor sizing.
I was going to expand it so rather than the rooms always being added from the top left point, a right mouse click would add from top right, and holding ctrl when clicking will draw from bottom left/right.
I was going to add in selections for all the usual legend items i.e. pit traps, one way secrets.
The last major things I want to change is to add a zoomed in drawing window, so you can see the whole level and just a small area at the same time, I want to add hyperlinks, so you can add a number to a room and clicking on it will take you to a screen where you can name the room, add a description, mosnters, traps etc and export this to Word. And possibly the biggest idea I want to add is levels.
So that basically you can design as dungeon as it is at the moment, but you could define rooms as belonging to a specific floor level so that when rendered in 3d they can sit on top or below other rooms.
I took a look at the adventure, it reminds me of the game idea stuff I came up with when I was around that age. As far as helping him with map drawing, did you give him a blank sheet of paper or graph paper? Having a grid might help, though I prefer having rough sketches versus carefully-gridded maps to work with in most situations, but there's only so much winging it you can handle at 9 years old.
I must admit that it looked better than I was expecting, given I was writing the same style of stuff when I was 11/12. I've not checked the monsters to see if they are appropriate to the party level (6 level 4 characters).
Maybe something like dungeon tiles might help? Though there's certainly a limiting element to it, the limiting aspect also makes things a lot easier as you get to pick from options rather than from whatever pops up in your head.
We've got some cheap versions of dungeon tiles (WorldWorks ones printed on paper and mounted on cereal box card), but i'm finding it hard to find the official ones at a reasonable price. After he drew his map (on blank paper), I let him lose with these and he refined it down to a pretty good design. I'll scan in his original map and the revised version later.
