Continue Your Game: The Jam - Devlog #5: How to Build a Dungeon

One of the biggest tensions in making Exit the D(G?)ungeon! is my overwhelming desire to tell the story and my overwhelming desire to not come off like a self-important asshole and ruin the vibe. I think that this is a tension that a lot of small, solo, and hobbyist devs struggle with. Not to get all linguistic, but an amateur (me) is someone who does something for the love of it. And I love my game! But what I, and I think I and anyone doing something needs to do, is to always think of how the best way to love my game is to always trying to show it off in the best light possible so that other people can love it too. And this is not yammering on and on about the game's plot. Or stopping people from actually playing the game so I can tell them "the story".

What the hell am I talking about? Well, maybe if I keep writing this we'll find out together.

So, right now I'm working on a new area. This is something of great importance because I really do consider "The Dungeon" to be the main character of this game. The player character is just a nondescript white person that I really intend as more of a cypher that the player can easily project their own feelings, and love of potatoes, onto. The Dungeon though, without giving too much away, is really the thing that I hope the player learns more about as they make progress. So, as such, a new area, much more than just another series of gameplay challenges, is meant to reveal something about The Dungeon and, as a constructed space, about the person who built it.

I had decided early on that I wanted this area to be the cell block, and that the player would face some tougher combat situations now that they were, hopefully, fully outfitted and had been able to make it through the first area. I also got a lot of requests for puzzles during feedback, so I started thinking about incorporating a red switch/blue switch puzzle that would help even out progress so that, if you died you could go back to the checkpoint without having to just complete the same loop over and over like the first area. 

Then it hit me! I haven't shown how big The Dungeon is! In my mind, this is a horrible, five level construction meant to hold everyone that King Armon considered an enemy. But I haven't shown that yet!

There's still work to be done, but this next area is almost urban in design with dense highrises made of prison cells. There's a video of what I have so far on the projects channel on Discord. I'm particularly proud of how I showed restraint and didn't wrest control of the camera again. Through the player's movement, either up or down, there is, I think, a nice establishing shot of just how large this place is. A new version of the game has also been uploaded and includes this area. It's pretty rough and you can walk off the side of the map but that's just what it is.

Now if you'll excuse me, there is half an inning left of the NLDS game and it looks like the Dodgers may win!

Peace.