I had the chance to sit down and play Guild of Dungeoneering with Gambrinous founder and game director Colm Larkin, at this year’s Game Developers Conference.
The game essentially puts you into the shoes of a dungeon master, for those who aren’t familiar with the term, you become the literal mastermind behind the ever-growing and evolving dungeon experience, for those intrepid adventurers.
The game has a cute and silly design aesthetic, everything looks sort of like a hand-drawn doodle, while the dungeon pieces, items, monsters, armor, weapons, and of course – the adventurers, ooze cuteness.
Gameplay unravels via turn based dungeon crawling, but the key factor here is that you never directly control your adventurer, you simply entice him or her to various goals. Each dungeon has an end boss, as well as potential hidden treasures, and a finite number of turns.
As you get cards to play from the dungeon perspective, you’ll have to play either monster, room, or loot cards to use up your moves before both your adventurer moves of his or her own free will. Colm mentioned this is somewhat of an algorithm working behind the scenes, where the adventurer will be drawn towards monsters he or she thinks they can beat, or if there’s some treasure laying about.
Things get interesting, however, when you’re greeted with a battle. When you confront a monster, you take part in a turn based card battle, and it’s quite brilliant. Much like the successful tabletop card games where you battle each other, Guild of Dungeoneering has you trying to think tactfully when dealing with baddies. Despite the dungeon atmosphere, Colm and crew have created a fun, quirky, and silly experience – complete with awesome flavor text.
I frequently found myself over-analyzing every single trait for each card, and each monster, as each monster and adventurer build has their own unique traits. As you collect more gear and cards, you’ll be able to effectively combat more unique and challenging scenarios, like the Bandito who primarily uses physical damage. Seriously, that guy is a jerk.
I was a bit shocked to find out the card battle mini-game was only recently implemented, that before you’d essentially have random card battles that equated to the luck of the draw. Clearly, this wasn’t working as Colm and his small indie team wanted to give players some more control over the battles, as they’re a very integral part of the dungeon crawling experience.
A big note – every time you dive into a dungeon, you start off with practically nothing, and no skills or abilities. It’s up to you to choose what to equip your adventurer with, as you obtain gear from defeated monsters of course. Instead of focusing on one character, you’re literally trying to better your guild of adventurers, so that if one particular build (archer, mage, etc) doesn’t work, you can come back with one that might,
The ultimate goal is to unlock more rooms (and therefore classes, and finally new cards) for your guild. There are reportedly a lot of different classes to eventually unlock and choose from, and even with my experience I realized you have a lot of options as you explore. I had a mage character, but I ended up building somewhat of a tank-y battle mage, and I steamrolled my way to the boss, who ended up crushing me.
Guild of Dungeoneering is quite an addicting and yet rewarding experience, and it’s being developed by only five developers including the Dublin, Ireland-based Colm Larkin. The game has been greenlit on Steam, and I only have good expectations of what’s to come for the card battling, turn based RPG, roguelike dungeon crawler.
Guild of Dungeoneering is on track for a release some time around the middle of 2015, across PC and Mac via Steam, and with a tablet release some time after.
