Dungeon Scrawl is a rogue-like typing-tutor game where you traverse a dungeon while slaying enemies and acquiring loot! As you get deeper, the dungeon grows stronger and stronger.. can you get to the bottom? (Hint: It's at level 5)
How to Play
Simply type the words in the prompts on the screen to perform your actions! Acquire loot to get stronger! Fight enemies with brute force and magic! Traverse deeper, and fight dangerous enemies! Can you get to the end of the dungeon? (Hint: It's at level 5) Known Bugs
There is a bug where sometimes the prompts are displaying, but when typing a word nothing happens. Usually walking in the opposite direction fixes it. If it doesn't, I'm sorry.
I love how this game combines two impossible genres and creates something greater than the sum of its parts. It's fun to play and well polished. If you fix the minor bugs, this game has potential after Ludum Dare.
I had like 3 attempts. long attempts. i reached level 5! but got too greedy...and didn't use the portal when i should have..and died. xD man this is a game i would play in my free time. so cool!
Hi guys, thanks for all the great feedback! I think I've adressed the bugs that broke the game (input not working..) now, so hopefully it should be a more polished experience now!
Hey! Sorry for promising to play test, but I kinda fell asleep at the time you messaged me. I did just test the game and it's fun! SADLY I ran into some game breaking bugs, even though you just wrote you fixed some bugs. Somehow the game still stops recognizing inputs in some occasions. I've gone ahead and recorded the bug (first one at 0:20, enemies fixed it, second one later), so you might find a clue on what could cause it. There's also another minor bug you can see in the video, there's a duplicate character for the walking at some point. (At 0:45)
Overall I like the game and I hope you find time and motivation to even continue working on it.
I could sadly not finish it since the bug sometimes made me stuck in one place... But bugs aside I think this is the best typing game I have ever played! I could easily see this be used as a writing excercise in schools i.e. a beautiful example on how to use games for educational purposes! It could be expanded by adding levels that use only certain words for grade student and with further tweaking it could start training the player by using words that the player find difficult. Like saving certain words that frequently are misspelled and using them more and more in order to gain mastery of the typing-dungeon-crawling-skkills within all of us. Fantastic work!
From the description, Dungeon Scrawl seemed like one of the awful "educational games" which often end up as neither education nor game. It most certainly was not. I ended up playing about half an hour and only stopping after I realised the time. The typing prompts are beautiful, and I love the little animation they do when popping out of existence.
Occasionally a monster did spawn right next to me at the start, which was a little disconcerting, personally I think I'd prefer a little time to prepare before jumping into combat, although this wasn't a major concern as I only noticed it once or twice in my play session. There were a few times with word movement where I got stuck in the word for one direction, but this was escaped with a backspace. I'd also like to be able to use backspace to undo an error, although this is only a minor gripe. Ooh, and pausing. Pausing is nice.
Got to agree with @wildcard that it could be a fantastic tool for teaching typing and word recognition, and with some modifications could be incredibly powerful for teachers up to even high-school to use with their classes. For example, the words used in game could be user-configurable with "language packs" of sorts, to allow for custom word levels for differing education levels, as well as potentially use in foreign-language education, maybe even with full sentences at level 5. Analytical information may also be a useful feature for educators' use, for example the number of mistakes made on words, letters or letter combinations, and the time taken to type them. So much potential for feature-creep :O
Also, pressing escape didn't seem to exit the game, but that's not important, who would ever want to leave? ;)
@The_Icy_One Thanks for the amazing feedback, I'm glad you liked it. Also what you wrote about the bug (pressing backspace to fix it) has enlightened me, and I think I know how to fix my bug now!
Killer mix of genres (literally, I died a lot). Having it being a dungeon crawl game made the typing motivating. The sound effects were lovely, would have loved some background tunes (which is asking for a lot in 48 hours). Kick ass job.
A very interesting concept that I feel lends itself very well to a school environment. With a few tweaks, this could for sure be the kind of game you would give to kids in school to learn to type.
Pretty much everything blew me away. I thought it was a Jam game and was prepared to give you a ton of praise. When I found out it is a compo game I couldn't believe it. Its genuinely one of the best compo games I have played to date in my 11 LD's.
This is a great entry, it's very polished and has a nice graphical style. Cool design decision to make the movement be a longer string when enemies are on screen. It could be interesting to have a mode where the direction keys are the same each time so that movement is faster. Overall it's a great game and a fantastic compo entry! Awesome work!
Neat game! I like how the typing made me have to get into a proper rhythm to defeat some enemies. The font made some words difficult to read, especially on hard mode where short words were required to move. I wish I had more hearts available, I found it got very difficult once I reached 2nd floor on only normal difficult. This game helped me learn how to spell some new words, so thank you!
This is really neat! My ten-year-old self learning to type would've eaten it up, haha. I kinda wish the single letters for directions were actually short words, since they're both easier and more useful to be able to type quickly. And I was startled when monsters moved between my turns -- it's not necessarily bad, just hard to predict, and I wasn't expecting it from the roguelike label. It looks great though, and the idea and basic mechanics are solid!
I had so much fun playing this! Over multiple attempts I got further and further along, which felt like good progression. My best run was to level 4, where I got killed by a mimic! A couple of times I spawned into a room with multiple enemies which felt a bit unfair, but not impossible to deal with. I also noticed a minor issue where it seemed the same word would be prompted in a row and it would fail to recognize. Overall fantastic work! Good sound, graphics, and excellent game feel. I will probably bust this game out again to test new keyboards with.
Comments36
man this is a game i would play in my free time. so cool!
I did just test the game and it's fun! SADLY I ran into some game breaking bugs, even though you just wrote you fixed some bugs.
Somehow the game still stops recognizing inputs in some occasions. I've gone ahead and recorded the bug (first one at 0:20, enemies fixed it, second one later), so you might find a clue on what could cause it. There's also another minor bug you can see in the video, there's a duplicate character for the walking at some point. (At 0:45)
Overall I like the game and I hope you find time and motivation to even continue working on it.
I ended up playing about half an hour and only stopping after I realised the time. The typing prompts are beautiful, and I love the little animation they do when popping out of existence.
Occasionally a monster did spawn right next to me at the start, which was a little disconcerting, personally I think I'd prefer a little time to prepare before jumping into combat, although this wasn't a major concern as I only noticed it once or twice in my play session. There were a few times with word movement where I got stuck in the word for one direction, but this was escaped with a backspace. I'd also like to be able to use backspace to undo an error, although this is only a minor gripe. Ooh, and pausing. Pausing is nice.
Got to agree with @wildcard that it could be a fantastic tool for teaching typing and word recognition, and with some modifications could be incredibly powerful for teachers up to even high-school to use with their classes. For example, the words used in game could be user-configurable with "language packs" of sorts, to allow for custom word levels for differing education levels, as well as potentially use in foreign-language education, maybe even with full sentences at level 5.
Analytical information may also be a useful feature for educators' use, for example the number of mistakes made on words, letters or letter combinations, and the time taken to type them. So much potential for feature-creep :O
Also, pressing escape didn't seem to exit the game, but that's not important, who would ever want to leave? ;)
Would be a great way to teach kids to type in a fun way.
I hope you keep working on the level balance.