Dungeon Cleared! started from a fairly simple idea: to create a dungeon crawler that is easy to pick up, works well even in short sessions, and can be understood without spending hours studying builds, skill trees, or enormously complex systems.
There are already plenty of games like that, some of them truly excellent, and they are games I still enjoy playing myself.
My inspiration was instead much closer to old tabletop dungeon crawlers from the '80: a small set of rules, miniatures, narrow corridors, monsters right in front of you, and immediate decisions to make.
Anyone who played those games will probably remember some of their flaws as well, flaws that almost became part of their charm: rulebooks that were not always perfectly clear, miniatures becoming awkward to move when too many of them piled up in a corridor, and situations where the people around the table inevitably ended up interpreting a rule in their own way.
When I started developing Dungeon Cleared!, I wanted to preserve that simplicity while adding enough structure to support a more tactical approach.
For this reason, some of the game mechanics were adapted from the SRD 5.1, released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. The idea was to use concepts that are already familiar to many dungeon crawler and role-playing game players, while adapting them to a much faster and more compact game.
And this is where, while working on the game, I realized there was a small contradiction.
If there are precise rules, stats, defenses, probabilities, hit points and abilities under the hood, it is a shame to hide them completely from the player.
Dungeon Cleared! should still work perfectly well for someone who simply wants to pick four heroes, open a door and see what is waiting on the other side. But from a tactical point of view, it can be very useful to know how many hit points that goblin has left before deciding which monster to attack, to understand exactly what a stat represents, or to check a hero’s abilities while exploring the dungeon.
That is why 2.1.5 introduces several improvements to readability and access to information.
The guide has been expanded, stats are explained more clearly, additional contextual information and popups have been added, and it is now easier to check the information you need during a run.
The goal, however, is not to turn the interface into a wall of numbers, bars and indicators.
I still want to keep the screen clean and readable for players who prefer a more immediate experience, while making the relevant information available to those who want to approach every turn in a more deliberate and tactical way.
In other words, Dungeon Cleared! remains the same game: easy to start, quick to play, but with enough rules beneath the surface to support a more tactical approach as well.
Developing a game almost entirely on your own has another consequence: it is very easy to become self-referential.
After spending hundreds of hours looking at the same screens and mechanics, something that feels completely obvious to the person who created it may not be obvious at all to someone launching the game for the first time.
That is why the feedback received so far has been extremely useful.
Please keep telling me what works, what is unclear, and what you think could be improved. That does not necessarily mean that every suggestion will make it into the game, but having other eyes on the project helps enormously in understanding where it is really worth making changes.
Update 2.1.5
Press F2 to lower dungeon walls while keeping the isometric view, improving visibility in corridors and crowded areas
Expanded in-game guide
Clearer stat descriptions
Improved access to hero information
New tooltips and contextual information
Improved readability of tactical elements
UI fixes and quality-of-life improvements
Bug fixes and minor polish
The dungeon will still try to kill you. But at least now it should do a better job of explaining how. 🙂