Undead Dungeon was created by Milo Fisher and Emery Plyler and was made for the Foundations of Video Game Design class at UC Santa Cruz. In this game, the player is a knight exploring a dungeon. As the player explores the dungeon, they can discover loot chests or a variety of monsters. If the player manages to make it deep enough into the dungeon, they must beat a boss monster to beat the game.

On this project, I was a game designer, programmer and artist. This game was built in the free version of Construct 3, so there was not traditional programming in this game, but rather using the editor to add behaviors to game objects. Additionally, because we were limited to the free edition, our team was limited to a finite amount of objects/behaviors. These constraints led me to some very interesting development tactics, for example, rather than making a separate object for the boss monster, I made every monster include animations for both the regular zombie and the dragon. Then, by changing the name of each object, had it use different animations and ability effects to essentially create multiple enemies from a single game object.

While work arounds like this were possible, it still made development of a game beyond what we made incredibly difficult. What we were able to accomplish, however, made the most of the built in features such as movement, pathfinding, collision, spawning, and much more. I found that programmer was more of a loose term on this project since I was the one defining the behaviors for the different game objects, but it was more in line with using blueprints than actual code.

Again limited by the engine we used, I had an interesting time designing the mechanics of this game, mainly by trying to implement combat and interaction using the available behaviors. I designed half of the levels, and found I had a lot more freedom when changing the layouts of the levels than the actual design since we could only define so many objects, but could spawn as few or as many as we wanted. When designing my levels, I wanted to reward the player for exploring beyond what they must, so I used hidden chests as the carrot on the stick. To add a further layer of depth to the use of chests as a reward, I also put some chests in quite obvious places, trapping them in a way by hiding an enemy off screen in a position to attack any players that may go for them.

Also interestingly enough, for this project I was also the main artist, making the art and animations for the player, monsters, walls, barrels, holes, floor, hearts, doors, and torches. Usually I only work as a game designer or programmer, so this was an interesting challenge for me to design art for a game. This forced me to learn a lot about making sprite sheet animations instead of simply implementing existing ones as I usually just do. I chose to do pixel art for this game because that is the only type of art I feel comfortable creating, as well as I really like the pixel aesthetic theme in combination with the dungeon crawler genre.

I really like certain aspects of this game our team made, but I personally felt much too limited by Construct to try to continue any development on this project. If anything, I would remake this game in Unity where I would have more control over the different aspects of the game (also because I like programming, and would rather program my own behaviors then drag 'n drop existing behaviors).