Spell Crawler - Feb 2025 Dev Log

Hello! It has been a long month and I wanted to run through a recap of all of the exciting features I've been working on. This time around I made a short video to go with it to highlight the changes without all of the down in the weeds details. Feel free to subscribe to the channel for further updates as well! So what have I worked on this past month?

Quests

As mentioned in my last post, this was the first thing I wanted to tackle as I thought it was essential for adding replayability to dungeon levels. Within the home base, you can accept new quests of currently two different types and earn rewards that might not be obtainable with the dungeon normally. Multiple quests can be accepted at a time and if you finish one while dungeon diving you have the option to return back to base early as well. Quests are only available after a dungeon is cleared for the first time. In the future I want to add more quest variety and spruce up the interface more.

Dungeon Generation

The old system I had in place was quite frankly a mess to deal with so the next thing I worked on was redoing the entire thing. Previously, rectangle rooms would be generated in a set area and then connected with corridors. The generation at times would turn out really wonky and if I wanted to do any amount of customization it would have taken a lot of leg work. Here is an example of what it looked like before:

So instead of this nonsense, I went with a pre-generated room approach. With this, I can freely decorate each room as I want and then piece them all together. The generation starts with a single room and then goes through all possible exits choosing new rooms to attach on. Eventually when a max room count has been reached, only rooms with one exit are placed to connect it all together. This approach, along side a new tileset I made, makes things look a lot better and customizable going forward. I still need to create a lot more room templates to make sure there is variety in generation, but that can come later.

Mystery Tiles & Status Effects

Games like to throw a lot of hidden traps at the player, but I wanted to introduce something that had a bit more of a random element to it than just applying a debuff to the player. Randomly placed through the dungeon now are mystery tiles! When stepped on a random effect will occur that could be good, bad, or somewhere in between. Right now it only applies a couple of different possible status effects, but I want to implement effects like teleporting the player to secret rooms, spawning obstacles or mini bosses, etc. I think there could be some fun interactions with having enemies step on tiles as well.

Home Base Shop

The final thing that I worked on this month was the addition of a shop within the home base! Now you can spend your hard-earned gold on items that might not be normally available in the dungeon. Items restock after returning from the dungeon and when bought go straight into your storage. In the future I plan to let you sell your items as well and just spruce up the interface.

What's Next?

I'm not sure yet! Usually when I write these up I have a big feature I want to work on next, but I want to do some planning first and figure out what I should prioritize next. Thanks for reading and stay tuned for the next update!