As Toy was more proficient at programming, he led the development of the game in the C language which generally produced fast effective code. Wichman learned the language from Toy as they went along while providing significant input on the design of game. The first two major aspects of the game developed was the method of displaying the dungeon on screen to the player, and how to generate the dungeon in a random manner. Limited by choices of what a terminal could display, they stuck to ASCII-based characters, such as codice_2 for empty floor space, codice_3 for doors, and codice_4 and codice_5 for walls of the dungeon. They also opted to use the "at" symbol (codice_6) to represent the player, considering this showed the player "where they're at". For the dungeon, they found initial attempts at purely random generation to be weak, in some cases having a stairway ending up in a room inaccessible to players. They found a solution through procedural generation, where each level would start on the idea of a 3x3 tic tac toe grid, with each room of various size occupying one space in this grid, and then creating the hallways to connect the rooms. Once they could have their character move about these randomly created dungeons, they then added equipment, magic items, and monsters. With magic items, they wanted the effects of these items to be a mystery on each run through, and thus would initially present the items to the player only by a descriptor such as by color, and only later in the game give the true name of the item once the player experimented or used another means to identify the item. For monsters, they wanted to have more advanced intelligence routines as the player got to deeper depths of the dungeons, but had started running into memory limits on the VAX-11, and simply made the monsters stronger with more health to pose more of a challenge.