Pocket Dungeon
The tutorial, which guides you through the controls.
How does your hero experience the dungeons?
The skills, the movement, the interaction.
7 heros and 9 dungeons to explore.
Defeat enemies, collect loot, raise your level and defeat Malgrim.

Inspiration

I grew up on hero campaigns from classic real-time strategy games: a small band of heroes, a map full of monsters, a story told in little in-engine cutscenes. Mixed reality let me ask a fun question: what if that map was the desk in front of me? Not a board game laid on top of the room, but a dungeon that is actually shaped by it, playable sitting down, in the few minutes between two other things.

What it does

Pocket Dungeon scans the surface in front of you with the headset's depth sensing and builds a miniature voxel dungeon on top of it. Your real things become the terrain: a stack of books turns into a tower, a mug into a wall, the keyboard into a ridge leading to an upper floor. No two desks play alike, and it works just as well on a tray table or the dashboard of a parked car.

Combat is turn-based and calm. Look at a tile and pinch to move or attack, slide your thumb along your index finger to switch between attacks and spells, then watch your hero and the monsters play out the turn. If you forget a gesture, turn your palm toward you and a card lists what that hand does right now. No controllers, no standing up, no waving your arms.

Seven animal heroes, from a lion knight to a lizard beastmaster with her wolf, each bring their own abilities, ultimate and voice. Their story against Malgrim, the Hollow King who folded their kingdom away, unfolds in fully voiced storybook cutscenes. A new daily dungeon, the same seed for every player but shaped by your own desk, keeps a streak going, and achievements, loot and leveling reward coming back. Switch passthrough off and a castle wall rises around you, stone by stone, until the dungeon's own sky replaces the room. Master everything and you can even shrink down and see the dungeon through your hero's eyes.

How I built it

Unity 6 with URP and the Meta XR SDK: depth raycasting for the desk scan, hand tracking and thumb microgestures through the Interaction SDK, passthrough with cutouts so your real hands stay visible over the virtual world, and the Platform SDK for entitlements and achievements. The dungeon generator works on a voxel heightmap of the desk and always guarantees a playable path; a test suite of over 200 cases checks generation, combat and progression without a headset. The voices were generated with Gemini TTS and cut into lines automatically with speech recognition.

Challenges

Keeping 60+ fps on Quest 3 with detailed dungeon art meant building the dungeon over several frames, foveated rendering and careful batching. Designing input that survives a narrow field of view and an airplane-seat-sized space took many iterations: pinch-only confirmation, gaze to pick, and thumb swipes to choose.