Debrief: Dungeon Crawler Jam 2025

Dungeon crawler jam 2025 is a game jam hosted on itch.io where the participants are tasked with creating a first person dungeon crawler and posting it so that it may be judged. The rules of the jam were simple, the game had to be in first person at all times, and it had to use classic style dungeon crawling movement: being able to move in four directions, and being able to twist the player in ninety degree increments.

What we had at the end of the jam, a simple ui system, a simple movement system, and a simple treasure chest script. Better luck next time I guess.

The themes this time were "Genre Fusion", to implement something from another genre, "Heist", "Sinking Ship", and "Treasure Hunting". This all created a potentially cohesive plan to put together. When talking with my jam partner about what we were going to do. My first thought went towards making a homage to Xybots, an old arcade style shooter with dungeon crawling elements, though we figured out pretty quickly that it wouldn't follow the rules. However, the idea of the game being a stealth shooter stuck.

The concept of the game was that the player was a space heister, who enters spaceships before they explode in order to steal whatever treasures were on it, this concept naturally hit all of the themes presented (and only took a bit of work-shopping to work with the restriction that the jam imposed upon us). The player still moved in the fashion of a first person dungeon crawler, but now their movements would be timed, enemies would move when the player moved, and when they didn't.

Unfortunately, we were unable to complete the game in time for the jam, the reasons were pretty simple, firstly, we had poor time management, we put most of our work in after the halfway mark, creating too much work for ourselves. Secondly, we overestimated our experience with the engine that we were using (Godot), this led to a lot more stumbling than initially expected. Though I consider myself a programmer, learning a new engine is something that takes a bit of getting used to. Though many of the broader functions are still the same, how they fit together is exceptionally different to how Unity does things. The last reason was that our resources were spread thin, we were a two person team, when we could have sought the help of a sound designer and an artist. I had to make the graphical assets for the game which admittedly aren't the best looking, and the current prototype lacks sound.

Godot provides quite a bit of tools to help out, but sometimes, it's hard to really dissect when they would be best used. An enigma I found myself confounded by was attempting to use a signal when a reference to an object would have worked a lot better.

However, since this game's concept is very simple to execute, I and my partner are giving ourselves another week or two to at least brush it up and post it on itch.io. While this jam wasn't successful, it wasn't the only jam that I entered this month, I'll writeup an article about it in a few days.