Dungeon Diver-wip

Game Overview

Dungeon Diver is a first-person combat game where you play as a miner for a mighty Dwarven empire deep beneath a mountain. Fight your way through dangerous underground chambers to gather valuable resources, which you can sell to upgrade your weapons and armour. With modular and linear level design, dynamic AI encounters, and limitless object creation systems, your journey builds toward the ultimate challenge facing the mountain’s powerful boss.

Role

Game Design, Level Design,

Technical Design

Year

2025

Software

Unreal Engine 5, Git, Adope

AI Design and Implementation:

Dungeon Diver features a variety of enemy AI types, including ranged enemies, close-combat fighters, and demonic creatures that patrol and guard key areas of the dungeons. To ensure efficient development and scalability, all AI are structured using Unreal Engine 5’s parent-child class system. A universal parent class handles shared attributes such as health, armour, patrol behaviours, and detection logic. This approach allows me to easily implement global updates or changes across all AI types, significantly speeding up iteration and testing.

Instead of traditional Behaviour Trees, I chose to use State Trees for AI logic. State Trees allowed for quicker iteration and modular control over different AI behaviours, making it easier to implement and customise states specific to each enemy type. This system is especially effective for handling the game's dungeon-based combat, where flexibility and simplicity were key. For example, unique demon enemies can trigger custom states, while ranged enemies maintain distance and line-of-sight strategies, all within a unified, maintainable structure.

Boss Encounter – The Dwarven King:

The final challenge of Dungeon Diver is a dramatic boss fight against the fallen Dwarven King, designed as a multi-phase battle inspired by Dark Souls encounters. With large sweeping melee attacks, the king demands players master dodging, blocking, and reading enemy patterns. His attacks deal significant damage, reinforcing the importance of upgrading gear throughout the game before taking on the fight.

The boss features three distinct phases, each increasing in difficulty and complexity. In Phase One, the king uses only close-range combat, teaching players his movement and attack patterns. Once his health drops to a certain point, Phase Two begins, where he introduces devastating magical attacks that are more difficult to avoid and often require players to use summoned environmental cover to survive. Finally, Phase Three transports the battle to a hidden underground arena, where the king combines his melee and magical abilities, creating an intense final showdown. This phase pushes players to utilise everything they have learned to defeat him, marking the completion of the game's core journey.

Linear Dungeon:

The main dungeon in Dungeon Diver is a handcrafted, linear experience inspired by titles like Skyrim and Zelda, designed to guide the player through a narrative-rich environment. This dungeon showcases the decaying remnants of the dwarven empire, using visual storytelling to reveal its downfall as the player progresses. Massive ruined structures, environmental storytelling, and carefully placed points of interest (POIs) encourage exploration and immersion. The layout gradually increases in difficulty, combining scavenging, puzzle-solving, and large open areas for combat. Players must navigate through collapsed halls and overgrown caverns, collecting valuable resources to sell back at camp and upgrade their gear.

Modular Dungeon Generator:
To complement the handcrafted level, Dungeon Diver also features a modular dungeon mode that offers procedurally generated layouts for greater replayability. I developed a custom dungeon generator that assembles pre-built modular rooms into a seamless and playable environment. This system allows players to choose the number of rooms before entering, effectively selecting their desired difficulty. The random nature of these dungeons ensures that no two runs are the same, providing fresh exploration and unpredictable combat encounters. This mode was designed to add dynamic variety and challenge, giving players more replay value and encouraging experimentation with different builds and strategies.

Dungeon and Armour:

In Dungeon Diver, weapons and armour play a crucial role in the player's progression. Players explore dungeons, find valuable loot, sell it for currency, and use the earnings to purchase better gear. This progression is at the core of the game's design, encouraging players to continually upgrade their equipment as they face more challenging enemies and environments.

To give the weapons an expansive feel, I designed them to be virtually endless. By using Unreal Engine’s Data Assets, I can easily create new weapons, each with unique stats, models, and characteristics. This allows me to introduce an infinite variety of weapons into the game, offering players a diverse selection to choose from. The weapons and shields are randomly generated each time, ensuring that the player encounters new items in every run. This randomness adds an element of excitement and variety, with players constantly discovering new tools for combat.

Data Asset Creation Method to Actor Implementation

Game Mechanics:

Dungeon Diver is built upon a variety of interconnected systems that work together to create a complete and engaging gameplay experience. From combat and item interaction to dungeon generation and progression, each system contributes to the overall depth and replayability of the game.

The core gameplay loop begins as the player enters a dungeon, equipped with basic weapons and armour. As they explore, they face a range of enemies, including ranged fighters, close-combat foes, and demonic creatures, each with distinct behaviours. Combat is skill-based, requiring the player to dodge, block, and time their attacks depending on their chosen weapon and the threat they face. Items such as shields and different weapon types influence the player's approach to each encounter.

As the player progresses, they gather loot and resources scattered throughout the environment. These can be sold upon returning to base, allowing the player to buy improved weapons and armour, as well as other essential items. One of the key systems in the game is the procedural item generation, built using Unreal Engine’s Data Assets. This allows for an effectively limitless pool of weapons and shields, each with their own stats and visuals, which are randomly selected and spawned during gameplay. This ensures each dungeon run feels unique and offers fresh gear to experiment with.

Dungeon Diver also includes a modular item shop system, allowing players to purchase more than just equipment upgrades. Using the currency earned from dungeon runs, players can buy consumable items such as health potions, stamina potions, and grenades. These items support the player in more challenging areas of the dungeon and give them more tactical options during combat. The system is designed to be expandable, meaning additional item types can be introduced in future versions of the game.

The dungeons themselves are built using both linear and procedural systems. The linear dungeon is a handcrafted experience focused on storytelling and visual progression, while the procedural dungeon uses a modular generator that pieces together randomised dungeon segments. Players can choose the size of the dungeon, which directly impacts the difficulty and the potential rewards. This gives players the freedom to take on shorter, easier runs or longer, more difficult ones depending on their current gear and goals.

Together, these systems form a dynamic and rewarding gameplay experience where each run offers something new, and progression is tied directly to exploration, strategy, and skill.

Dungeon Diver-wip

Game Overview

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