Dungeon Crawler

News & General Discussion
1

Hello everyone,
Does anyone know where I can find a good tutorial to create a Dungeon Crawler game such as Legend of Grimrock and Dungeon Kingdom just to name few?

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I don’t hang around here much - but your message came to my email - so I thought I’d reply since this is one of my favorite genres.

The developer of The Fall of the Dungeon Guardians used to be a frequent participant on these forums. ManaGames, though I can’t remember his forum name. He can probably give you some great insight.

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Consider searching up walking simulator tutorials first. In a modern 3D engine, freeform movement is generally easier to implement than grid-based movement.

When you’re comfortable with that, you can make some design decisions:

  • Freeform movement or grid-based? With modern grid-based movement, you need to make sure that the party, enemies, and objects all end up aligned to the grid. However, it’s more complicated than simply snapping them to the grid, because they’re going to be in-between grid coordinates when they’re moving.
  • Realtime or turn-based? Turn-based combat means you need to delay activity while you’re waiting for turn input and processing turns. Enemies can’t just keep attacking in realtime; you have to script the logic that makes them idle until it’s their turn to attack.
  • Party or single player? Having a party means turn-based management is more complicated, and of course there’s more data and UI to manage since you have multiple PCs.

There are a bunch of other interesting design decisions with grid-based blobbers, too, such as where to place pickups and interactable items so they’re accessible from one grid space but not others.

So a grid-based, turn-based, party-based dungeon crawler is in many ways more complex than a freeform single-PC first-person game. If that’s what you’re aiming for, give some thought to breaking it down and doing tutorials on individual aspects such as freeform movement (which you can then later modify for grid-based movement), turn-based combat, and party management.

I’m a fan of dungeon crawlers, too, so feel free to share your progress and get feedback on your designs here in the Game Design section!

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