A Nameless Dungeon Crawler indeed, when I started working on this one I figured that I would think up a name as I developed. So I put it off and then found myself having completed the game with no name magically sprung forth to label it with. So A Nameless Dungeon Crawler it remained, a top down 2D dungeon crawl meant to be unforgiving.

The game has the player progressing through rooms of a poorly lit dungeon, filled with goblins who don’t mind the darkness one bit. As the player stumbles through the maze of hallways they’ll find gear, heals, and lanterns to help them on their way and make their goblin killing escapades all the easier. But something more threatening than goblins seems to be blocking the path out!

This game was to put it simply kind of a silly idea from the outset. I wanted to make something entirely in Python to buff up on the language while having fun at the same time. So I found a library called Arcade and went to work. For the most part the game is your standard dungeon crawler with power ups, heals, baddies, and the option to make things harder (or easier).

I did do one thing that pushed Arcade to its limits: implementing a fog of war system, where tiles on the screen would only become visible when they were close enough to the player. This involved some simple 2D math, a few arrays to keep things in order, and the final product was a clean fog of war system that I was really happy with! The dungeon was as dark and cramped as I had hoped it would feel and nothing is quite as panic inducing as sneaking around looking for a heal when a goblin pops up and shanks you instead!

The downside to Arcade was that I could never get it to package up in a way that made it publishable, so while I did make the source code available through my itch page you’ll have to go through the process of installing the library and Python to play it yourself