Overview

Dungeon Rustlers is a retro dungeon crawler for the PC. Players command one of three playable classes, fight their way through 50 dungeons, and try to climb the global leader boards for time and score. The three class types play significantly different from each other, thanks to variations in attacks, special abilities, power-ups, and health.

A collection of enemies are waiting for you in each level to try and stop your adventure. Our goal was to make the game progressively more difficult as levels progressed. Each enemy has varying movement, attacking, and spawning mechanics.

At the start of the game, levels are simple and comprise of a single chamber. Moving past level 20, levels start building up to include additional rooms, passages, and hidden areas. Don’t step in the acid – it burns!

Technology

We built Dungeon Ruslters using Game Maker Studio 2 by YoYo Games. I wrote a couple of custom shaders (link and link) which were used in the game. A lot of creative tricks and scripts were used to solve various problems such as interacting with Steam, the power-up system, dealing with game pauses, tile-based collision detection, and more. We used the GML scripting language (not the GUI-based one) for all of the coding and in-game logic.

The Team

Three primary team members were contributors to the project. Myself and Derrick Schommer were coding as well as marketing. Herb McNally created all of the initial artwork and typography.

In addition to the core team we had some additional talent help out to bring this creation to life:

• Enya Angel – voice of Knight
• Jason Perry – pixel art ninja
• Dmitry Zhbanov – Chiptune composer extraordinaire

Post-Project

Dungeon Rustlers was an incredibly fun project to work on. It was a success for one major reason: we shipped a title. As of now (December 2017) it doesn’t look like it’ll be a big money maker, but a lot of valuable lessons were learned which will be put to good use – in the next game!