Dungeon Deliverance

As part of the first semester of the Bachelor's program in Computer Science at FH Technikum Wien, we were given the opportunity to realize our own first project. The result of this project was Dungeon Deliverance.

Again and again, the heavy footsteps of the green golem echo through the dungeon as he attempts another escape. Again, he fails miserably. But given the valuable items he's found along the way, the odds for another escape attempt are surely better this time — certainly.

Pitch for Dungeon Deliverance

Dungeon Deliverance is a simple 2D auto-scroller built with the Unity Game Engine (C#). In a team of four, I took on the roles of project lead, art, and programming.

This project was my first attempt at making 2D pixel art. It was especially interesting to learn more about frame-by-frame animation and the import and export of pixel art — for example, how sprite sheets work and how they're turned into full animations in Unity. It was also interesting to discover that limited color palettes don't necessarily make life harder — quite the opposite. They create a creative constraint that made it easier for me to make decisions.

Another distinctive aspect of the project was the genre. Auto-scrollers were unfamiliar territory for me before this project. Interestingly, this genre takes away a piece of player agency, since the protagonist "moves" automatically. That raised the question for me of how to reintroduce that agency in another form. The simplest solution was to confront players with decisions during the run — for example, whether to risk a dangerous jump to collect a crystal or not. The fact that players are given very little time to decide made the levels of Dungeon Deliverance significantly more exciting.

Working with this team, I was able to build my first complete game. Where before I had only ever built tutorials and prototypes, the structure of the program helped me develop a game with a closed game loop.