Dungeon Scrawl

To play the game yourself, just click here!

Overview

Dungeon Scrawl was developed within 48 hours for the GMTK Game Jam 2022. The game was designed and programmed by Sebastian Bolatto, and the excellent art was created by Wesley Tan and Andrei Davydov. The theme of the GMTK Game Jam 2022 was “Roll of the Dice,” and so Dungeon Scrawl was built as a turn-based dungeon crawler where the player rolled a hand of dice each turned and used the dice results on abilities to defeat enemies. Dungeon Scrawl took heavy inspiration from games like Dicey Dungeons, Slay the Spire, and Tainted Grail: Conquest.

Development

The fact that this game jam was only 48 hours long meant that there was very little time to spend on ideation and refinement of concepts before starting development of the game. Furthermore, this was the first time that myself and my teammates had participated in such a short game jam, and so we definitely underestimated the amount of time fully developing our concepts would take, especially since I was the only person in the group with any experience in using Unity and programming a game. However, the game jam was still certainly a positive experience, as it taught us a lot about teamwork and focusing on small ideas.

I started by creating a rough design outline for the game. This was mostly a document where I could jot down ideas, and receive feedback from the other team members. The design outline can be viewed by clicking here.

After roughly figuring out the design of the game, I held a discussion with the rest of the group in order to establish an art style for the game. Since both of my teammates were artists, I wanted to get an idea of the art style of the game down and so that I could start giving them specific tasks. We settled for a lighthearted, sketchbook-like art style with cute enemies and hand-drawn icons. We felt that this sketchbook style fit in well with the dungeon crawling gameplay and “Roll of the Dice” theme, since it evoked the nostalgia of playing classic Pen-and-Paper role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons or Fighting Fantasy books. To further fit in with this theme, I had my teammates draw classic fantasy creatures to use as enemies, such as goblins.

Next, I got to designing player abilities and enemy attacks. I wanted the player’s abilities to require the player to intelligently consider what the best use of their current hand of dice results would be. Since certain abilities worked best with certain dice totals, the player had to be smart when adding dice totals together. I also wanted the player to be able to create a build that worked best with lower-value dice, rather than only having the player want to roll high numbers. I feel like the abilities that I created in the end managed to not only have the player think critically about their decisions, but also gave the player multiple options in terms of the build they wanted to go with. However, I also believe that the abilities are too nuanced in terms of the dice results they require and could do with being less mathematical.

In the end, I am quite happy with what my team managed to create within the 48 hours of this game jam. The game clearly shows off the talent of each member of the team, and we’re glad we were able to create an enjoyable and unique product. Our team hopes to be able to work on this project more in the future, and create a more fully-fledged game out of this demo with all the features we wanted the game to have in the first place.