Dungeon Raider Post-Mortem

Rather late post-mortem time! This is The Evil Cult’s most ambitious jam entry yet, Dungeon Raider. We’re really happy with how it turned out, and would really appreciate some feedback on it. It’s by far the most we’ve been able to cram into the 72-hour timeframe of the jam.

Dungeon Raider! A fast paced real-time roguelike. You only have one life!

What went right?

The lighting adds a lot to the look of the game. The walls and floor are all mostly the same (with a few variations), but the lighting and shadows help to vary the look.

The dungeon generation works really well. I really like the room-based approach that we opted for, as it gives some variety in otherwise very similar rooms.

The number of features we managed to get in – items + working inventory management, loads of unique scrolls, potions and spells.

The coins spilling out of treasure chests look really cool, both in the graphics used and the scattering of the coins.

What went wrong?

Our audio guy was unwell, so we had to make do with some quick sfxr sounds and royalty-free music.

One of our artists was also unwell, and only made it for one day of the jam. As such, the main character, while cool looking, is lacking a full attack animation.

We didn’t manage to quite get as many monsters into the game as we wanted, and the boss fight was lacking – we had hoped to build a lengthy boss fight with a number of mechanics involved.

The game requires a reasonably powerful computer to run. We simply didn’t have time to optimize the game to run well.