I've made bitsies and I've made roguelikes. This was inevitable.

You are Halfway Mouse, and you're all about choices that matter in games. But oh no, you're in a roguelike and everything is random - do your choices matter anymore?

What I'm picturing is a "depth crawl" - it's a linear dungeon where you start from the top, go to the bottom, and go back. Each step along the way is randomly generated.

Instead of exits we have sprites that will teleport you. To allow backtracking we'll have variables called ROOM_1, ROOM_2, etc. that start blank and get set when we use an exit.

So random rooms is kinda solved right?

But what else could we do? I'd like more random elements and maybe a fail state here and there so there can be jokes about permadeath.

Nice idea! I tried doing something similar but with no backtracking to ease the process (you were falling down the well)
https://boticelly.itch.io/where-are-you-kitty
I also did a permadeath-like mechanic: the game ends when you run out of "guts" and starts over. Regarding randomness, I also added several randomized quests to spice things up and give players some rewards for exploration. For example, when you meet a ghost, they ask you to find their grave. As you encounter graves along the way, there is a random chance for each of them to have the ghost's name on it.

This is awesome, thanks for sharing.

I've been toying with the idea of fake randomness with lots of hidden items. To make it feel like what speedrunners do to control RNG, but also to make a jokes about whether things are actually random.

Ha, that sounds fun. Will you use shuffle dialogs for this?

I might have to create a variable for each sprite, so it locks in a list choice from the moment you bump it.

I'm thinking one dice roll at the start (an event maybe). Then everything else is technically not random, just rotating the current number 1,2,3.

So I need to avoid shuffles if I want to sell the vibe that you can control your fate. (But also trick you in making it look random.)

Oh, cool idea. That's totally opposite of the way I did it but actually sounds solid and very appropriate for your design goals. 

I'm looking forward to playing your game!