Starting a Dungeon Crawler

Time for a game jam!

It’s been a while since I’ve done anything gamedev related, and for some reason I’ve recently been obsessing over old-school dungeon crawlers. So, with Dungeon Crawler Jam 2026 coming up next month, I thought I should make a dungeon crawler!

Until the Jam theme is announced I don’t have any solid ideas on setting or theme, but I’ve been thinking through some of the stuff that I would like to have (in addition to the Jam requirements):

• Turn Based (No Grimrock here!)
• Party-based - though I’m still undecided on the party size.
• Fully 3D - I want to make myself get some Blender experience in.

To this end I’ve started prototyping some systems in Godot so that I have a starting point - just simple stuff like movement, interaction, turn scheduling (Don’t worry, it all falls within the Jam rules!)

Since I’m aiming for 3D, Grid Maps seem like a very natural starting point - though I’m not sure that I’ll wind up using any of the collision/navigation support. I guess I’ll be inheriting from it and adding additional support to help with movement (validating whether tiles can be moved into etc)

I was also recently reading Bob Nystrom’s A turn-based game loop blogpost which has given me some inspiration on a starting point for turn scheduling. I think the Command Pattern makes a lot of sense. I’m less convinced by the energy system, though I’ve seen many roguebasin articles with similar ideas. I think I would prefer to have a very obvious turn queue on screen, particularly so that the player could see exactly how long multi-turn actions (like channelling a spell) will do to the queue. Without diving deeper it’s hard to plan how this would feel best.

Anyway, this is just a quick intro devlog to throw on the internet - and to give me some sort of accountability. I should post more of these as I noodle away on this project. Who knows, maybe by the end of April I’ll have a full-fledged if very simple game, and a cool devlog documenting the making of.