New to this year's game jam, we introduced a panel of judges, each assigned to check out all the entries and select their top five favorites. Unexpectedly, we received nearly 200 submissions, which took a considerable amount of time to play through. The judges unanimously agreed that the overall quality was exceptionally high this year, with numerous outstanding games that show great potential to be developed into full-fledged commercial products.

Among all the submissions, the judges collectively selected 19 games, which demonstrates a remarkable alignment in their choices.

The Dungeon Crawler Jam 2023 is done and it's been the biggest and bestest so far! With more than 1800 participants and almost 200 entries it's officially now one of the big jams. I never in a million years would've thought that would happen in such a niche genre and with so many specific rules :)

This year the jam produced an amazing amount of great games, many of which I hope will be developed further into fully fledged commercial games. 

A huge congratulations to the top 3 games from the community voting.

1. Zorg & Shlak - https://evigouroux.itch.io/duality-dungeon-crawler-jam
2. Whispers of Fate - https://triplevivi.itch.io/whispers-of-fate
3. The Beast of Oakenbrook - https://ilyos-games.itch.io/the-beast-of-oakenbrook

Check out the results here:

https://itch.io/jam/dcjam2023/results

The Dungeon Crawler Jam 2022 has been a great success. I thought following up last year monumental success was going to be difficult but this year we had an even greater submission ratio of 18% (12% last year) and a massive amount of ratings. Not to forget, a whole bucket load of great new dungeon crawlers!

Screenshots from the sequel to The Quest by Redshift Games was just published, and they... look... amazing!

Skullstone has been in development since 2015 and is currently a Steam Greenlight Project. 2015 is quite a bit of time of course, but with the release of a demo on the latest Steam demo “fest” we get a chance to try out this modern crawler. Does it stand up to its potential?

Let me tell you. I love running this website and the discord server. Quite often someone throw me a link or a mention of some game in development or just recently released and the discovery of these amazing new games fuels my passion forward.

This time it is an amazing creation called RASKOPNIK: The Trench Warrior made by Wilderness Theory. Crawl around in the trenches during the 2nd World War fighting nazis and trying your best to stay alive. You got only one life. If you fail, try again: Learn, adapt, progress.

Just a quick heads up to let you know that Kordanor is checking out all the submissions for Dungeon Crawler Jam 2021.

If you didn't get the chance to try some of these games yet or missed the jam altogether then head over to Kordanor's YT channel.

Romanus Surt from Graverobber Foundation has written a post mortem for the futuristic survival horror dungeon crawler Der Geisterturm. In it he describes development challenges and what went wrong and what went right.

Read the full post mortem here.

Christian Dumancic posted an update video of his dungeon editor on our Discord server and I was immediately impressed by the level of polish and functionality. I especially like the in place editing which is a huge step up to the usual 2D top-down level editors you see.

The editor use a custom engine written by Christian himself and everything is made from scratch using C++ and DirectX 11, with possibility to add Vulkan and DirectX 12 support later.

There is so far very little info about the (nameless) game he is making other than it is a homage to Eye of the Beholder and that is exciting stuff! I hope to learn more about it in the weeks to come. Watch this space :)

A minty fresh demo has been released of the game The Darkness Below by Sabbas Eleftheriadis (vlzvl) and I couldn't be more excited!

Dungeon Crawler Jam 2021 results are in!

Congrats to the winner and well done everyone that submitted a game. It's been an absolute joyride! 78 new additions to the dungeon crawler universe. Hours upon hours of crawling. Good times :)

A really nice guy by the name Fernando Pereira joined our Discord server yesterday and told us about this game he's working on called Underlair. He showed us some early gameplay videos and I was blown away by the gorgeous graphics and great atmosphere. I assumed he was making the game in Unreal Engine but to my surprise he is using Unity. Me being a long time Unity user was fooled by the amazing visuals he have achieved, and it's not even using the HDRP pipeline!

A new dungeon crawler called Dungeons Of The Deep by Gray Mantis was just released on Steam.

CryptRate, who released a free three-level hard-as-nails dungeon crawler in 2018 (review here) has done it again and close to the end of this year released another free scifi dungeon crawler on itch.io.

To Hell With Guns is a niche title in a niche made for a one-week gaming jam. It’s a first-person turn- and party-based dungeon crawler for people who are really into making their own maps and enjoy getting lost in a dungeon.

Wizardry, one of the oldest and still one of the most playable dungeon crawlers of all time, has now been fan-translated for the Wonderswan Color. The game has been released on many computer and console systems and yet, it's always neat to me to see another version translated.

While the Madou Monogatari series has the most unlikeliest of venn diagrams, people into dungeon crawlers and people into very cutesy looking anime visuals (even compared to other anime its over-the-top cutesy), its still dungeon crawlers news. So bear with me.

Magic & Mercenaries: Curse of Eternal Darkness is a game currently in development by ProphetSword that aims to emulate the classic Goldbox-style games from SSI that combined dungeon crawling with tactical combat. M&M:CoTD covers similiar ground, you have a 6-character party choosen from 15 classes and a fantasy-themed adventure with dungeons and cities to explore and many monsters to fight.

One of the unsung and often forgotten champions of old-school dungeon crawlers has just been re-released on GOG. The Dark Heart of Uukrul, a party-based, fantasy-themed crawler that sports top-down combat reminiscent of the Goldbox games but with a strong focus on an intricate and well-developed dungeon with some rather good puzzles.

Just a quick news update to let you know that Fatbot Games' brilliant game Vaporum: Lockdown is now also available for Mac OS and Linux on GOG.

Source: fatbot-games.com

Thanks to enterprising GridCartographer user rikkles (@RikRetro on Twitter) you can now natively play Apple II games through GridCartographer, as he added support so that GridCartographer and AppleWin can hook up with each other (similiar to how the developer of GridCartographer created a custom DosBox version to hook up GridCartographer with Dos games in the past).

Of all the dungeon crawlers currently in development, the one I look forward to the most is Stellar Terminus. Here's the brief in the creator's own words, which I couldn't have summarized better: ST is a first-person, hard sci-fi dungeon crawler set at the heat death of the universe. You explore an endless sea of lifeless planets and abandoned megastructures, built and inhabited by various AI factions with their own style.

Developer Cannibal Interactive just released a dungeon crawler on Steam with the eloquent title It's Six Random Characters and a Single Floor Dungeon, That's the Whole Game which is less a name and more the sales pitch of what you're getting here. I bought it and checked it out because a game like that looks more like a curiosity or gimmick than anything else.

I remember the days when mapping dungeons on graph paper was half the experience when playing dungeon crawlers. Fast forward three decades and I'm stilling playing the same dungeon crawlers but now I don't have the same patience to draw the dungeons by hand. Luckily there is a program which allows me to map dungeons quickly, and depending on the game, maps the levels automatically when I move. Grid Cartographer is the most useful and feature complete software for mapping dungeon. I can't crawl without it.

Legends of Amberland is a turn-based, party-based dungeon crawler taking place in a classical fantasy world where you have to find a missing crown to ultimately gather the forces of good to stand against the armies threatening the kingdoms of men and their allied races. Though to call it a dungeon crawler is a misnomer, this is very much modeled after the classic Might and Magic 3: Isles of Terra, and like most Might and Magic games you really crawl a massive world with very shallow locations.

This might turn into great news for us all, as Japanese company Drecom has acquired the copyright and trademark rights, domestic and foreign, to the Wizardry intellectual property.

If this means that they will develop a new first-person & grid-based game under the Wizardry label remains to be seen. Drecom is a mobile game developer and maybe their line of past games suggests that we should expect?

Source: gematsu.com

Silver Lemur Games just announced an update to their game Legends of Amberland.

What's in the update?

• [misc] Added missing Master of Willpower (the 5th Master). Fully compatible with your older saves, you can just find him now. Check forum for the exact location if you just want to complete the online achievement.
• [misc] Started Wizards rebalance, it will be an official feature in the next version. Now you can enable the experimental version of it by going to Options then clicking "Wizards rebalance 122". Check "Wizards rebalance" topic for details.
• [interface] Tooltip CTRL support for selected magic and item (on all screens). Useful for people who play using keyboard alone.
• [fix] Keyboard remapping was sometimes crashing the game.
• [fix] Magic shop was incorrectly applying a gold cost to some items (the bug was introduced by a price difficulty fix in v1.15).

Read more about the update on the Steam page.

Dungeon of Dragon Knight by HexGameStudio has just been updated to a new version and a Collector Edition has been launched.

Updated:

1. Fixed the Hit rate. Follow the DND rule: if ATK is below enemy DEF, you make 0 damage.
2. Updated Damage Display: physical damage and additional elemental damage in a single attack are separately calculated.
3. Optimized the sense of use when you switch direction by mouse-click.
4. Not to disturb the lonely atmosphere of single-player game, screen-bullet is off by default.

The Dungeon 0f Dragon Knight - Collector Edition contains the following items:

1. Dungeon of Dragon Knight
2. Dungeon of Dragon Knight-OST
3. Dungeon of Dragon Knight-Ambient music

MaeL, known for this LP's on YouTube and current WR holder in EOB speedrun, gave a short interview with one of his viewers in the comment section under his Black Crypt stream video.

There are five sections of Q&A. The first part is about dungeon crawler game mechanics in general. The second part is more focused about Black Crypt.

If you haven't been living under a rock the past couple years you should already know this, so I'll just leave this one here for all the rest of you. In a not so distant future (or so we hope) all the gridder loving people with C64's will be able to crawl an amazing port of the uberclassic Eye of the Beholder. For a while now Andreas Larsson and his team of artists have been working hard on the port which currently looks fantastic and appears to play equally well!

If you ever watched some Let's play videos of gridders on YouTube then you are probably already familiar with MaeL. He's done a bunch of them in the past. Now he's gone and done one better - he's set a new world record in Eye of the Beholder speedrun and it's a staggering 5m 58s! It blows my mind that this gem of a game can be completed in that short amount of time!

Just a quick update:

• I changed the game listing so that it's now showing the complete game list in a brief style with alphabet link shortcuts.
• Moved "Years" to a sub display of the game listing.
• Added a theme chooser for those of you who prefer a brighter version of the site :)

Great news! There is now a Discord server for dungeoncrawlers.org for those of you who wish to stay updated and contribute to making the website even better and to grow the content!

If you want to contribute with ideas, suggest games or (game projects) or simply just hang out and chat about gridders then come on over :)

On the off-chance that you don't already know this; let me tell you about a very talented Finnish guy called Petri Häkkinen (@petrih3 on Twitter). Petri is developing a dungeon crawler for the VIC-20 (yes that's correct!) called The Fall of the Black Mage. What I have seen so far looks very promising and this game might turn in to something really special.

For as long as I can remember I've loved playing dungeon crawlers games. For an equal amount of time I've wanted to make my own, and I did, numerous times. If I had a dollar for every proof-of-concept, tech demo or unfinished game project then.. well.. I wouldn't be rich but I'd have a substantial chunk of cash :) On April this year it finally happened! I finished a game! The game is called The Ogre King and albeit small in scope, I finished it and I released it. This makes me an official game developer, and it only took like 35 years, lol!