Dungeonade draws heavily from its influences: The Legend of Zelda, and Dark Cloud, even just in its earliest alpha phase. The current goal of development really is to approach the “feeling” of the controls from, in particular, Dark Cloud 2 (also known as Dark Chronicle outside of North America). If you haven’t played a Zelda or Dark Cloud game, the general premise is a third-person action-adventure role-playing game. In the case of The Legend of Zelda themes of exploration, puzzle-solving, and combat are more prioritized than Dark Cloud’s focus on ‘dungeoneering’, resource management, and even pseudo-Sim City townbuilding.

Though Zelda and Dark Cloud are the inspirations behind Dungeonade, I want to emulate the aspects I enjoy in these games without becoming too derivative. Although the game is progressing towards a Legend of Zelda-styled overworld populated with Dark Cloud-styled dungeons, I’ve tried my best to keep my development steered such that these different concepts are brought together in a cohesive way! This means that normally peaceful non-player characters are equipped to deal with that which may wander in from the dungeons, and the dungeons are developed such that these characters might wander into them as well!

Dungeonade features a day-and-night cycle with a presentation not unlike The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask in that the various characters living in the village have routines. They wander from place to place or have different dialog options depending on the time of day, or even which character is being played as. In contrast to the extensive stories played through in a Dark Cloud game, Dungeonade aims to provide a highly re-playable game nearly in the vein of a roguelike — where each file started provides newly generated dungeons to explore and an opportunity to witness different events and conversations with the various characters.

Randomization and customization are the biggest goals for Dungeonade’s development, with targets to have a diverse, semi-randomized pool of weapons and character builds to keep each new game feeling unique. By bringing together elements from Dark Cloud’s party system and The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask’s unique gameplay of taking on different forms with unique playstyles and combining them with concepts from Dark Cloud 2’s expanse of customization and progression options my hope is that although the game can be easily picked up and started again anew with high re-playability, it could also be a game where the player may sink hundreds of hours into a single file.

Of course, these are lofty goals at the onset of the project, however developing a game that is a worthy tribute to Dark Cloud or The Legend of Zelda can’t be achieved all that easily.