Make a Dungeon Crawler In Construct 2

With dungeon crawler video games, players explore maze-like, underground caverns in search of monsters to defeat and treasures to acquire. Player characters become stronger by gaining experience and equipment but the monsters get meaner and deadlier as they go deeper into the dungeon.

Dungeon crawlers take inspiration from the original tabletop role playing game, Dungeons & Dragons (1974). A college student soon used his school’s PLATO educational computer network to create the first dungeon crawler called m199h (1975?), named strangely to hide the program from network administrators. However, no games were allowed on the school’s system and it was promptly deleted, now lost to time. Rusty Rutherford later used the same system to design pedit5 (1975), setting the standards for the dungeon crawler genre: the player has an overhead view of their sword-wielding warrior exploring interconnected rooms, fighting fantastic monsters, and acquiring gold and magic. Another PLATO game, dnd (1975) added the tropes of shops to buy potions and gear, teleporters, a boss monster, minibosses, and the first video game quest (defeat the dragon and find the magic orb).

Rogue (1980) used text for graphics and featured randomly generated dungeons that were different with every playthrough, starting the roguelike game genre. The Atari VCS cartridge Adventure (1980) by Warren Robinett was the first game console dungeon crawler (also one of the first games to include an easter egg) and set the stage for Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda (1986) by Shigeru Miyamoto. Earlier dungeon crawlers featured turn-based combats but these console games made players move and fight in real time, upping the excitement.

Recent dungeon crawlers have evolved the genre in fun and new ways. Guild of Dungeoneering (2015) is a dungeon crawler card game. In Darkest Dungeon (2015), your party of adventurers must deal with developing phobias and other afflictions after facing horrific monsters. Nuclear Throne (2015) and Enter the Gungeon (2016) are both twin-stick shooter dungeon crawlers. Crawl (2017) is a multiplayer brawler where one player at a time is a dungeon crawling hero while the other players are monsters working to defeat the hero. Any monster player who defeats the hero then becomes the hero and continues the quest!

Students will learn how to use Construct 2 to perform the following:

• Create a player object and place collision.
• Learn how to make the player shoot a projectile and place bombs.
• Create enemies for the player to face.
• Create levels for their game.
• Create various power ups for the player to collect.