I’ve survived my second Ludum Dare! I had an awesome time, and I really feel like I made a better game than last time. I’ve always been a huge fan of old-school dungeon crawlers like ADOM, Daggerfall, Lands of Lore, D&D Warriors of the Eternal Sun, Shining in the Darkness, etc. so I had no trouble staying motivated while creating Deadly Dungeon:

This time I decided to go for the 72 hour jam from the very start (last time I intended to finish in 48 hours, but ended up needing an extra day) and that helped keep my stress level much lower because I knew I had more time to work with. I built the game in GameMaker Studio, and all the art was created using the built-in image editor. Recently I bought the HTML5 plugin for GameMaker, which was awesome because it is even easier for people to try my game this time around! I did have to make some optimizations to the collision detection to make it run smoothly in the HTML5 version, but other than that it was ridiculously easy to develop for both windows and HTML5 at the same time. Yay!

I wish I could have gotten more features into the game, like secret rooms, spells, a blocking mechanic (I created the sprites for it, but didn’t have time to implement blocking) more monsters, furniture/torches in some of the rooms, and more. But I’m still very proud of what I managed to complete. The gameplay is simple, but I did refine it a ton. Hopefully the results are worth it. There is even a small “easter egg” in the form of a special monster type that only shows up rarely. See if you can find it!

Thanks for reading, I had a wonderful Ludum Dare, and I hope you did too!  😀