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Another Dungeon Crawler
Draw your sword and get ready to fight your way through endless retro dungeons! How far will you get? Kill enemies and clear dungeons to find out!
Another Dungeon Crawler is built with a fully functional Emulator UI, playable in browser on your mobile or computer. Check it out on itch!
My Roles
Gameplay design, Audio, UI
Tools
Unity, 2D
Year
2023
Another Dungeon Crawler was made by three students, working half time, over two weeks as a part of an Experimental Game Design course.
The prompt for this challenge was to make a game based on the theme Game & Watch.
To further limit ourselves, we implemented a fully functional emulator-esque UI, and attempted to sell the idea of a game that's larger than what fits on one screen, while staying true to the no-overlapping-sprites limitation of Game & Watch consoles.
Insights
The Goal
At the end of the project we wanted a novel game, providing a retro-nostalgic feeling of playing a knockoff Game & Watch console game. Furthermore, it needed to sell the illusion of a game that was larger than would fit on one screen, without overlapping sprites.
The Process
To ensure we did not waste time, the project began with a lot of mental simulations. A basic idea was drawn up, and then we played it out verbally, challenging each step in an attempt to identify any problems before we wasted time writing a single line of code. As soon as we had something that seemed to work in our mental simulations, we sat down and produced it digitally, before repeating the process in an attempt to bring the concept further.
Problems
Despite our best attempts at avoiding them, we did run into problems. The first was regarding movement - due to the repetitive nature of the map, movement was sometimes impossible to discern. To solve this, we squeezed in a few patches of grass between the sprites, which could be generated at random, to create enough variety in the map to show movement.
The second problem was based on the combat and design of the enemies. Enemies could not be too complex, lest they take up too much space in the tiles.
The solution I came up with was to make them ranged. This would allow minimal animations, while allowing for a pattern of behaviour that was still interesting.
Takeaways
This project was primarily an exercise in rapidly producing a product with clear limitations. While it was interesting to manage the scope of the project on the fly, working levels of polish into the game as we went, the primary takeaway is in regards to the mental simulations.
The mental simulations were, in effect, a rapid and less conventional version of brainstorming. It begins with the end point of the game, and works it's way backwards, finding justifications that would allow for it to be. Once established, we would work the other way around, simulate the game step by step, and be on the lookout for things that lacked logic, or things that we felt we wanted to do.
