Dungeon Dweller

Dungeon View
Battle
Treasure
Camp
Merchant
Bestiary

Inspiration

Dungeon Dweller was inspired by classic dungeon crawlers and tabletop-style risk and reward. The goal was to combine retro exploration and D20-inspired combat with a focused survival loop where players must decide how much danger to risk for the resources they need to grow stronger and escape.

What it does

Dungeon Dweller is a single-player, portrait Survival & Resource Management game. Players explore procedurally generated dungeon floors, gather Supplies, Scrap, Essence, Gold, and relics, and convert resources into useful survival improvements. Gathering and exploration increase Dread, creating more pressure as the run continues. Players must balance gathering, upgrading, fighting, and staying alive while descending through four increasingly dangerous floors.

Death causes a setback and adds a Death Mark without erasing the entire run. The ultimate goal is to collect at least three relics, survive to Floor 4, and escape.

How we built it

Dungeon Dweller was prompt-built with AI assistance using HTML5 and JavaScript. Development followed an iterative process: build a mechanic, test it on mobile, identify what worked or failed, and refine it.

The prototype combines procedural dungeon generation, portrait touch controls, resource gathering and conversion, Dread-based survival pressure, adaptive difficulty, D20-inspired combat, upgrades, merchants, encounters, retro graphics, animation, ambience, music, and sound effects. Everything is packaged locally in a self-contained offline build.

Challenges we ran into

Mobile playtesting uncovered blocked dungeon exits, inconsistent interactions, combat-state bugs, audio playback problems, UI scaling issues, reward-feedback problems, and difficulty-balancing concerns.

Several ideas were redesigned or removed entirely when testing showed they hurt the core experience. Dice-based movement was replaced with responsive exploration, an overly punishing final boss was removed, stair generation was hardened, and the resource systems were reworked to make Survival & Resource Management a central part of the game rather than a secondary mechanic.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of turning a simple dungeon concept into a complete survival loop:

Explore → Gather → Manage Dread → Fight → Craft & Upgrade → Descend → Survive → Escape.

Supplies, Scrap, and Essence give exploration a purpose beyond collecting treasure, while rising Dread forces the player to consider the cost of continuing to gather.

We're also proud of the Death Mark and adaptive-threat systems. Progress makes the adventurer stronger, but the dungeon partially responds to that growth so later runs can remain dangerous without making upgrades feel meaningless.

What we learned

The biggest lesson was that more features don't automatically make a better game. A smaller number of mechanics that reinforce each other creates a stronger experience.

AI made it possible to prototype and revise ideas quickly, but playtesting was essential. Features still had to be tested, balanced, fixed, or sometimes removed. The final game became stronger when we focused on making gathering, progression, survival pressure, combat, and exploration work together as one repeatable loop.

What's next for Dungeon Dweller

The next step is expanding the existing survival loop with additional dungeon environments, resource interactions, enemies, relic effects, encounters, and procedural variety.

A future version could also translate the experience into a 3D dungeon with rigged characters and more immersive combat while preserving the same core identity: gather what you need, decide how much danger to risk, grow stronger, and survive the descent.

This version is much safer for your submission because someone reading the Devpost page can immediately see why Dungeon Dweller belongs in Survival & Resource Management, rather than having to discover that while playing.