Day One - Setup and Idea Finding

Here we go again, another Jam, another project. As an avid fan of grid crawlers, I always found fun in stretching the boundries of the genre without breaking them and to inject that into a playable game, I decided to join the Dungeon Crawler Jam 2024. The first day has almost passed and I want to make it a habit to conclude each day with a small to medium sized blog post here.

As this isn't my first Jam and not my first attempt for a grid crawler, I was in the lucky position to have several pieces in my jam toolkit, which directly cater the needs of such a game. I immediately started to collect those pieces and setup a generic "engine" to run the game on within Unity, while reflecting on the four different themes of this jam. At least one has to be choosen and clearly integrated into the game:

1. Infinity/The Endless
2. Ancient Ruins
3. Solitude
4. Cosmic Horror

It was an immediate decision to rule out Infinity/The Endless. As my biggest ambition with concepts for grid crawlers is to integrate a strong narrative into the genre, this felt much too generic for me. Ancient Ruins rang some more bells to me, but I found it hard to find appropiate assets to even start with it and I didn't want to hazzle with asset creation in this jam. Solitude contradicted my idea of having some kind of confrontation in the game, so in the end, Cosmic Horror was the most obvious choice for me.

My first idea was to take the cosmic literally and set the game in space. I found inspiration in Dan Simmons Hyperion tales and the movie Event Horizont. This idea would have included plenty of dialog and a lot of locations and quickly became scary in its own way by suffering from obvious content creep. I tried to tame down the idea by browsing through the pages on the Synty Store, which I have plenty of, but the game resisted to shrink. Eventually, the Haunted Mansion and the Swamp Biome Pack grew to me, with the latter being a surprise, as I wasn't even aware owning it. So, back to square one, new idea with this new setting.

In the end, I went for very classic lovecarftesque story approach. You play as the person, who received a letter to investigate something in a creepy and remote area, you have to discover ancient secrets and confront unspeakable horrors, which affect your health and sanity. The game utilizes quite simple and small dungeon areas, which will be decorated manually, so the grid movement takes place in handcrafted levels. The levels are connected by diaramas of more complex locations, which will allow you more detailed interaction, more like an adventure game.

Currently I'm planning with a real time kind of battle, where enemies are usually to overpowered to be fought in the first place. It is up to you to discover the secrets of these horrors and with knowledge about them, you can start to defeat them. Learning about your enemies is planned to work like some kind of skill tree, which allows you to progress in the dungeons. In the end, you need to reach and destroy some kind of artefact, ritual or place of whorship and destroy it.

Still, this idea is a big game, but I feel, I have a lot of areas where I can cut corners for the jam, without loosing its identity. I can scale down the number of enemies to even one, I can limit the buildings to enter and with it the potential dungeons and I can scale them down in size as well. Let's see, how this works out, at the moment, I'm quite excited for the concept.