Hi guys , I'm developing a procedurally generated top down. My biggest concern right now , is the problem of how to communicate the player a sense of progress. I mean, I pretend that each world that the game creates, be able to communicate on the path the player will have to do to beat the game, for example in Doko Roko each world is a different tower, you beat the game by reaching the top of the tower; in Children of Morta, in each world history goes as how the player interacts with his family, that ends up defining the different stages of the game ; and in Downwell, the player simply falls into the depths of the game in search of rescue your cat -that is at the bottom-.

So I'm looking for references / ideas of this kind that could be integrated into my game. I am very interested in communicating progress through level structure, but since is a top down,the answer does not come obvious (in a sidescroller you can go down/ up... but in a top down?)

*I can do it via visual narrative - For example, I could make the finals level with a "threatening feel".

Some enjoy the trial and error of procedural games 'is this area safe? is it dangerous? I'll just have to go in and find out' and next time they will know that say, a cave is a place thats to dangerous for a novice, and a castle needs them to really build up their strength, but these locations hold what progresses them in the game/story?

Plus many top down games still have the vertical element, like old Roguelikes would have stairs up and down and the higher or deeper you got the harder things got, this would mean having your world generate some areas in different levels though (This could also provide a nice divide of difficulty and hence progress).

You may want to take a look at Bindings of Isaac and FTL. In my opinion both games communicate progress in very good way. Player has clearly defined target of each session and has to "milk" each "level" the best he can until proceeding further.

Every world is relatively small so player is not overwhelmed with available choices or possible exits. Player knows that exit will increase difficulty so he has to prepare instead of rushing. Also premature death can also be satisfying as difficulty increase is so significant and number of total levels / sectors is small enough that it makes difference to player if he died on 3rd or 4th one.

Both games also offer small subset of their content on each session so a player will encounter new enemies or events even after many hours of playing (but that's different story :)).

What if you added companions (maybe temporary, they need to get somewhere and it's on your way; maybe permanent, they're after the exact same thing as you are; maybe a mix) to the game? If you go with permanent companions, maybe they can reveal a little bit more about themselves each level, and by the end of the game (if they survive) you feel like you know a whole complete character. They can also provide indications of progress like "I think we're getting close", as well as adding a sense of detail to the game that would be hard to communicate to the player otherwise ("ick, I stepped in something", "it smells like something died in here") and possibly even add layers of history and backstory that would otherwise have to be communicated with boring cutscenes or plain text. The best part? They can be procedurally generated too (choosing a random branch in a carefully constructed tree).