Andrew McLennan-Murray and I met at an Unreal Meetup in San Francisco and were discussing how much two people could potentially do with Unreal Engine. We did a bunch of prototyping and eventually decided to iterate on the theme of exploring dark fantasy dungeons. As we tried out different mechanics and art styles and tested them with players, we discovered what people enjoyed most about the game.

And now surprisingly for us, we recently won Nvidia EDGE award so it’s a good sign we are on a right track with this.

Planning

The pre-production involved a lot of trying different things. In our early designs, for example, we were doing a lot of procedural generation. We had these completely procedurally generated infinite dungeons where everything was placed at runtime including lighting. Making art for them was a huge challenge. We heard from players that the procedural levels weren’t that fun, so we decided to take a more hand-crafted approach to level design. Andrew is a huge fan of Metroidvanias and wanted to capture the feeling of terrifyingly lonely exploration. Once we decided on that and started exploring the theme of the dungeons having a sentient core, everything started to come together, but we had to be willing to walk away from what we’d already spent time building.