jshrihankumar - Stardance

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@jshrihankumar on Dungeon Python game · 12 days ago

I made a 2D dungeon crawler game using Python and Pygame. In the game, the player moves through a randomly generated dungeon made of rooms and corridors. The goal is to reach the exit while avoiding enemies and collecting healing items. The dungeon changes every time you play, so each run feels different. The game also includes basic enemy AI, where enemies either wander around or chase the player if they get close.

The hardest part of making this game was the dungeon generation system. At first, a lot of the maps I made had problems like rooms not connecting or the exit being unreachable. It took a lot of testing and fixing to make sure every dungeon is actually playable. Another challenge was the enemy AI because I didn’t use advanced pathfinding, so I had to make a simpler system that still feels like the enemies are chasing you. Balancing the game was also tricky because changing small things like damage or enemy count could make the game too easy or too hard.

I’m proud that I was able to build a full working game that actually feels different every time you play. The dungeon generation works, the enemies behave in a somewhat smart way, and there are clear win and lose conditions. I also like that I kept everything in one Python file but still made it work as a complete game.

To test the game, use W, A, S, D to move around. Try to avoid the red enemies because they will damage you if they touch you. Pick up green items to heal yourself. The goal is to reach the yellow/gold exit tile to win. If your health drops to zero, you lose and can restart the game.

1 devlog
11h

Try project → See source code →

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@jshrihankumar on Dungeon Python game · 18 days ago

11h 27m 14s logged

Devlog: Building a Roguelike RPG in Pure Python

The original goal was pretty simple: build a fully playable terminal roguelike from scratch in one Python file. No game engine, no outside frameworks, just the standard library and a lot of free time.

Most of the systems worked fine on their own for a while. Combat felt decent, dungeon generation was working, and items loaded correctly. But getting everything to actually work together was way harder than expected. FOV, enemy AI, status effects, and saving all needed to talk to each other and there were a lot of moments where killing an enemy would crash the save, or a spell would try to hit something that didn’t exist anymore.

That couldn’t stay broken once boss fights and multi-floor progression needed to actually function. So most of the work became just making all the pieces cooperate reliably.

The Goal

For the game to actually feel good:

Procedural dungeons should feel different every single run
Combat should have real depth, resistances, crits, status effects and all that
Enemies should do more than just walk straight at you
The save system should handle any game state without breaking
Bosses should actually feel scary, not just be big HP sponges

For the code side:

Everything needs to serialize to and from JSON cleanly
No weird dependency loops between the combat engine, dungeon, and player

What Changed

The dungeon generator now uses BSP room placement instead of just scattering rooms randomly. Enemy AI got split into 9 different behavior types including chase, patrol, ranged, ambush, support, berserk, flee, guard, and idle, instead of one giant mess of if statements. Status effects now tick on both the player and enemies every turn separately. I also completely rewrote the FOV using shadowcasting across all 8 octants which honestly took way longer than it should have.

What Actually Broke

Pretty much everything had issues at some point.

The shadowcasting FOV has a bug on the northeast octant where some walls stay invisible when they should be visible. Still figuring that one out.
Saving in the middle of combat sometimes drops enemy status effect potency on reload. The duration saves fine but potency resets to 1 for some reason.
The floor 6 shop occasionally spawns completely empty if the floor RNG hits a certain seed. No idea why yet.
Boss loot is guaranteed to drop but sometimes lands on a wall tile if the boss dies in a bad spot.

What’s Next

Fixing the FOV bug, patching the save and load status issue, and adding actual targeting for spells so they stop just auto hitting the nearest visible enemy. After that probably more boss phases and a high score system.

It’s playable and honestly pretty fun. Just not finished yet.