Dungeon Delver – a game in a month

Since gamejams work so well for my gamedev productivity I've decided to take part in a similar monthly challenge: One Game A Month. The basic idea is to try and finish one game every single month – it can be something simple or complex as long as you complete something every month. There is loads more information at onegameamonth.com – I highly recommend taking part!

Make Gamedev Challenges. Not Excuses.

Not only that – but I've helped set up a meetup group for fellow 1GAM enthusiasts in Dublin, Ireland. We are going to meet at the end of every month to playtest each others creations and generally swap war stories. Our very first meetup was last night and was a great success! If you want to join us sign up to the 1GAM-Dublin google group. But what about my game for April? Read on!

The Theme

To mix it up a bit 1GAM Dublin will be picking themes slightly differently to the main 1GAM group – for April we kept it simple by reusing the main site's March theme which was 'Rogue'. After a bit of brainstorming the game I decided to make was 'Dungeon Delver' – A game where you explore a dungeon by laying out new room tiles one at a time. A bit like a 1 player version of the boardgame DungeonQuest. Here was my initial design doc:

My design doc 'sketches' are becoming legendary in gamedev circles

As you can see this was pretty basic. I purposely kept the design as simple as possible as I knew from past experience how hard it is to finish something in a short timeframe. My initial target was to try and build something that would be possible to get working in a single weekend – I could always spend the extra time on polish & extending it once I had a playable prototype.

My first day of work got me clickable random dungeon tiles:

Not very exciting - yet

The next step was to give you a target to aim for in the dungeon – I added a treasure room:

Cha-Ching!

Plus – a little bit of player choice. Every time you clicked one of the yellow explorable spaces you had to pick between two different possible tiles:

Hm. Not much of a choice here.

And soon after that a little more spice.. some rooms contain treasure or monster encounters!

So bags of gold or being savaged by a monster? Let's see..

At this point April was drawing to a close so despite having more ideas I wanted to implement I decided to spend my last evening on a round of polish, adding much a cleaner overall look + sound effects to the game.

Play The Game!

Go ahead and give it a go right here. Comments and feedback welcome!

The purple really sets it off, doesn't it.

Thanks for reading! Now check out Guild of Dungeoneering, a game I'm making where you build the dungeon instead of controlling the hero! \o/