Quick Recap
Per my usual style, I’ll run through a quick recap in the first section summarizing everything we did this month, then jump into some details for anyone interested.
This month, I started work on a prototype I’m calling the Dungeon Builder Game. It started by laying out some basics: player movement, a pathfinding enemy, and a simple level layout. I took a quick break from development for a weekend trip to Japan, but unfortunately the trip followed me home in the form of an illness that left me stuck in bed for a week. I’m still recovering a bit, but managed to get a lot done in the final days of the month.
Rapid Prototyping
The name of the game early this year is rapid prototyping. The goal is to come up with a lot of different ideas and bring them to life in their most minimal form possible. No bells and whistles, nothing pretty - just something we can build fast and put in front of players. The sooner people can playtest, the sooner we find out if something is actually fun.
The Dungeon Builder Game is the first step in that direction. It’s inspired by a number of popular co-op chaos games (Peak, RV There Yet, Lethal Company, and many others) that put a group of friends into a simple situation and let the chaos between players create memorable experiences. This emerging genre has jokingly been called “friend slop” - messy, improvised, and surprisingly fun.
The unique ideas that I want to bring to this genre are:
Embedding a dungeon crawler and combat-focused theme into this experience
Offering progressive, skill-based challenges for players who want depth beyond chaos
Supporting user-generated content, allowing players to build modular rooms that anyone can play - also conveniently outsourcing level creation to the community
Unfortunately, even a minimal prototype for something like this is still fairly complex. I spent the first third of January learning multiplayer workflows and experimenting with networking tools. Turns out, it’s not nearly as intimidating as I thought — just a shift in how you structure code, helped greatly by modern tooling.
I also spent time building player controllers and enemy pathfinding systems, and probably lingered too long trying to make things perfect before realizing I just needed something good enough to test - a typical trap for many developers I’m sure.
Enemy chasing the player off a ledge
Losing Half a Month
Midway through the month, thanks to the generosity of a close friend, I took a quick “long weekend” trip to Japan. The plan was a short getaway - fly out on a Thursday morning, back late Monday night, right back into work again.
Instead, I came home seriously sick and spent nearly a week barely able to get out of bed. I honestly can’t remember the last time I felt that bad... and even now I’m still dealing with some brain fog and appetite recovery. Don’t get me wrong - the weekend was fun, I just didn’t expect it to eat up so much of the month.
That said, I managed to regain momentum in the last days of the month. It feels like I’m ramping back up from scratch, but I know consistency and patience will get me back to the groove I had toward the end of last year. And as my roommates will remind me - sometimes the most productive thing you can do is let yourself recover properly so you can come back stronger.
Despite the setback, in these last few days, I still managed to:
Build a modular “room builder” system that allows rooms to be created and saved for later use
Connect those rooms into the runtime loop so rooms spawn sequentially - this is what essentially creates the endless dungeon that players will traverse
Implement some basic combat systems
Rework AI pathfinding to function within these new modular rooms
At this point, we finally have bare bones gameplay, meaning we can now start adding fun.
The ‘Room Builder'
Multiple rooms linked together
Blender Returns
Another win this last week was getting back into Blender.
I’ve always hated searching online for models and animations - they’re often overcomplicated or incompatible with what I need for prototypes. Spending a day refamiliarizing myself with Blender workflows was hugely valuable. It turns out it still feels pretty natural, and now I can quickly throw together simple assets myself.
Say hello to Gobbo, the first model I’ve made in a long time. He’s not detailed or very pretty, but that’s part of the charm - and considering the fact that it only took minutes to throw together, that’s a huge win for future prototyping.
Next Month
It feels great to have nothing major scheduled for the next few months. Just open runway to build momentum again.
The goal for February is as follows:
Finish the Dungeon Builder Game prototype
Ideally finish one additional prototype
Evaluate which of these ideas has legs (if either) based on feedback from close friends playing them
January also left some important unfinished items, mostly around content creation and sharing work publicly. This newsletter has been my minimum commitment, but it’s time to experiment more aggressively. I’m considering dedicating one full day per week purely to marketing and social content. Scheduling time for this will hopefully force experimentation and help me discover what works.
With some of the information Jack (RealXP founder) has been passing my way, its become evident how important personal branding is becoming in game development, so expect to see me try things, fail publicly, and hopefully learn quickly. Should be entertaining either way!…
That’s all for this month - thanks again for all the support and see you all in March.
