Sauer2 {l Wrote}:most of those tilesets seem to be generic
Of course, if you don't want a boring generic tileset you have to draw something on your own / persuade or hire an artist. If you're speaking of pen-drawn images, you might make a roguelike in a drawn realm, where every object is pen-drawn.
are miniquests/special rooms/in-game lore that are randomly put into the maps or not a thing?
Theoretically, if you want to make a roguelike game, you should really play some of them
I'd really recommend
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup which has nice graphics, relatively convenient interface and deep gameplay, and it's FOSS. Also try
Meritous. To look from the other side of what the dungeon crawler can be I'd recommend you "
Hack-Slash-Crawl" flash game, proprietary and poorly balanced, but a good demo of real-time crawler. Play a few more games, like
FreeDroidRPG to get the style you want to. You may also try some first-person dungeon crawlers like and old
Dungeon Hack (or, better,
Eye of the Beholder), etc. In general, you don't have to master all of those, but at least looking at youtube clips would give you a nice idea on that.
So, basically the answer to your question is: It depends. There are games which have lore, there are games that don't. There are games that have mini-quests, there are games that don't. There are games that have special rooms, there are games that don't.
In general, roguelikes/roguelites strongly rely on random map generation with an excessive wiki on the game Lore and information.