Developing Chessplosion's Dungeon Mode

Last Thursday I released dungeon mode as a free update to Chessplosion. It’s by far the biggest update I’ve made to the game, turning it into a procedurally generated dungeon exploration game along the lines of The Binding of Isaac or Enter the Gungeon. Here’s the trailer, in case you missed it:

When I started working on this update, I didn’t plan on making the new mode as big as this. It was originally just going to be a fight against a series of random waves of enemies with a way of upgrading your character after every 3-5 waves, like a procedurally generated version of Adventure mode but with upgraded bombs.

At one point I even mocked up a gameplay system where you had a ‘deck’ of bomb cards and you had to add or remove cards from the deck to determine which bombs you would randomly generate during gameplay. For example, you could remove all of the Knights from your deck and add a bunch of upgraded Rooks so by the end of your run you were a powerful Rook-dropping machine. It turned out that this wasn’t such a good system, because optimizing all of the “bad” bombs out of your deck causes you to lose out on the fun of having to adapt to the random bombs you are given.

After replacing the card deck with some permanent upgrades and temporary weapons, the new mode was almost ready to release last October. But for some reason I couldn’t stop thinking about how the game’s code would technically be able to handle dungeons in the style of 2D Zelda or The Binding of Isaac, and I couldn’t resist giving it a try.

It turns out that there are a ton of standard roguelike tropes that just don’t work in Chessplosion:

• You can’t upgrade the player’s weapon range or give them new weapons that fire in different patterns, because the weapons match how chess pieces work and the player always has access to all of them.
• You can’t even make a lot of upgrades to the number of bombs that the player can drop at once, because they have friendly fire and you don’t want to get caught in the blast.
• You can’t upgrade the player’s damage, because all hits do 1 damage.
• You can’t upgrade the player’s health too much, because all enemy hits do 1 damage too.
• You can’t have active items, because the player only has one button and the game is already complicated enough as it is.

Despite all of this, it somehow turned out okay! Before I knew it, I had added spikes, spiderwebs, conveyor belts, breakable blocks and even some new enemy types. Even the limitations ended up leading to some unique-feeling gameplay, and I’m super happy with the finished dungeon mode.

I was happy with the original launch version of Chessplosion too, but my one regret at the time was that there wasn’t any replayable content for people who finished all of the single player modes and didn’t want to play competitive online matches. With the addition of dungeon mode, that regret has gone.

I hope you enjoy dungeon mode as much as I do!