NOVEM

Logo
Purgatory
Character
Map
Enemy encounter

Inspiration

I always wanted create a dungeon-crawler in the means of Wizardry, Might & Magic and Ultima Underworld. These inspired me with my interest in the Divine Comedy by Dante, which I just reread this year. The combination was given itself, nine circles, dungeon crawler, fun.

What it does

NOVEM is a portrait, first-person dungeon crawler that runs in a single HTML file with no network access. You descend nine procedurally generated circles on three finite resources - oil for the lamp, blood for melee and for being hit, salt for the only ranged attack. None of them regenerate; they exist only in caches on the floor. Each floor is a route problem: find the key, take the caches, reach the stair with enough left to go further. A run ends three ways - you die, you retreat from a lit brazier and bank what you carried out, or you clear the ninth circle, which opens the next rung of a six-step difficulty ladder.

How we built it

Three.js on a deliberately small architecture: one plain state object, one reducer where every rule lives, and two projections - the Three.js scene and a DOM overlay - that follow state and never write to it. Content is frozen catalog data, so adding a circle, an enemy, a relic, a weather condition or a difficulty rung is a table row and zero logic. Generation and combat share a seeded PRNG, so a run is reproducible from (seed, circle); geometry and textures hash off a separate stream so building a floor can never shift a combat roll. Nothing is shipped that can be generated: the stone, the sky, the decal atlas, the parchment map and the drawn art are all canvas-generated from FBM plus a per-circle palette, and floors are merged BufferGeometry emitting only faces that border open space - about seven draw calls. A build step inlines the source, unminified, into one index.html that works from file://.

Challenges we ran into

Most of the hard bugs were measurement problems, not code problems. All about graphics, normal maps, the texture generation, fitting everything together was a tough one and required a lot of back and forth.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The circle generation: the textures look so fitting, with the light, the sky and the whole environment has a certain charme and difference between all circles.