Game Design Gallery

Jack Dibden

Gems Of The Dungeon – Mobile

A turn-based dungeon crawler mobile game

Project Overview

Gems of the Dungeon is a game I’ve made at least 3 times now. Two being Python projects and now a mobile game, with each variation being a new take on a very simple concept: meet random monsters and beat them up to be better at beating up more monsters later.

The move to mobile was my first attempt to release a project officially coming out of uni while hunting for work within the industry. In turn with projects this small and a team of 2, it was a huge learning experience about working independently and seeing a project from start to completion.

A Retrospective

The strongest gameplay mechanic of the game was the limitation of health regeneration. The main way the player could regenerate health was 1 full heal per floor, via a shrine that showed up in the middle of each floor.

This simple mechanic forced players into a persistent choice: Take fights and trade health for items and gold, or save the health to survive longer. The importance of this constant balance was heightened knowing that some encounters benefited specific stats to be avoided, and items could give you more stats, so risking your HP for an item could prevent further battles if you were lucky.

However, in review Gems Of The Dungeon had some serious bugs and flaws, particularly with expressing the impact of options the players had: Informed Player Agency.

Some options had a chance of having multiple outcomes which was never stated, and the 4 gems needed to beat the games could be easily missed. This was deeply unsatisfying as the player would have to play the game up to 6 times to learn all the routes possible to find the true victory.

The bugs of showing what happens between actions were also never properly fixed, and while you can generally track what happens it takes some getting used to, and work on clarity wouldn’t go amiss.

While my first game ever to be publicly released, it was a major stepping stone in learning how to create fun and engaging games. It was fun creating all the items, enemies and backgrounds, designing a new take on combat and coming up with silly events that were there just to make me laugh. The Skeleton that demands you take two terrible daggers to avoid the fight is a personal favourite.

Art dump

While the art made isn’t anything to start a career on, creating digital art has remained a hobby of mine that I use in my work to express ideas and plan with better clarity, and I’m still proud of the art made for the project!