Dungeon Crawler

July ’18 — February ’19 || Unreal Engine Blueprints Maya Mudbox

You play as a miner who falls into an old dungeon during a cave-in and now how to fight your way out through a horde of skeletons!

I created a first-person hack & slash that has a saving and inventory system with graphics comparable to a Triple-A equivalent on the same platform.

Retrospective

If you ask any kid who wants to make a game what they’d like to make, they’ll all give you an answer. Mine was Project Dungeon Crawler.

Originally, I wanted the player to explore a town and take jobs that would send him into catacombs. As I got a little bit more experienced in Unreal, I simplified the game to just take place in one dungeon.

Town houses using hand drawn + photoshopped textures

I wanted to have high graphical fidelity that didn’t produce high draw calls. This meant that I had to optimize:

• Use simple materials, and use normal maps sparingly.
  Note: Normal maps can look really good with only a base color
• Don’t use realistic textures as they can age and vary in quality.
  Instead: draw my own
• Use LODs on complicated meshes and lower the number of mesh instances.
• Can have baked lighting but only one moveable light.
  Instead: have no lights in dungeons and give the player a moveable light.

Results:

The Mine at the start of the game

The Dungeon. Notice the normal mapped textures on the left compared to hand drawn textures on the right.

The appearance of the town in Dungeon Crawler were based on houses from Klingholz, Germany, and Hall in Tirol, Austria.