New Project: Dragon’s Dungeon

When I was much younger than I am today, sometime back in the late 1980’s, I remember having an electronic Dungeons & Dragons game found at a yard sale that I was able to go home with. To play, you had to choose a starting position on the game board and move around. At any point the game could make a wall noise to indicate you couldn’t move from one square to another and would have to place a wall piece on the board. Somewhere else on the board was treasure you needed to locate and get back to your starting position while determining the layout of the random labyrinth. The danger came in the form of a sleeping dragon that would awaken when you got too close. You would then place the dragon on the board where you thought it was and had to then navigate the map the while having it chase you without knowing precisely where it was. It was a brilliant game utilizing imagination and it introduced me to the concepts of logic, randomness, procedural generation, and a rudimentary form of artificial intelligence. This game was responsible for igniting so many wonderful things in my brain and nurtured my love of video games and computer programming.

Now, decades later, I have thought about this game again as I am in the process of reigniting my passion for programming. I wanted to take on a gamedev project that would be fun to put together and would be something I see not only accomplish, but see through to completion. This was the perfect idea! This game that gave me so much joy as a kid and helped get me started into the world of figuring out programs and games actually worked could now do the same thing for me all over again as I thought about how to turn it into a fully computerized simulation.

Initially I set to work jotting down notes on everything I could remember from playing it over 30 years ago to try and capture what I could: board layout, movement rules, board interaction, and dragon engagement for starters. I wasn’t too clear and came up with my own ideas to fill in any gaps I had knowing this needed to be a fun computer game to play or maybe an app. The more I started designing, however, the more I realized I just didn’t remember.

This led me to search online to see if I could actually get my hands on one all this time later. Early hits topped out at $300, a bit pricey for my nostalgia project, but this was for collectors who were looking for pristine versions and not at all what I was after. I simply wanted a working version of the game that I could document and put together all the rules and programming I would need for my computer version. Eventually, I was able to find multiple affordable options that I purchased. I bought one because it was listed as fully functional and another non-working one for the spare parts that the first one was missing. By combining the two I would have exactly what I would need to get started and it ran about $75 all inclusive. When I received it I was stoked to find it worked perfectly and totally brought back those days of spending hours on end sitting and trying to steal the dragon’s treasure!

After playing a few games I got to work documenting the rules and workings of the game as they would need to apply to my programming. My board design was even off, so I modified those plans as well. I was now prepared to sit and start building my game in Unity.