Download the source for this entry

Author’s Readme

4k Dungeon Romp is an homage to Wizardry and all the games it ended up inspiring. Today, the dungeon crawl genre is probably less popular than it’s successor, the Japanese role playing game, but I like to remember that dungeon crawlers and roleplaying games are an American invention, starting with Dungeons and Dragons, Wizardry, and Rogue. With that in mind, I set out to recreate a little of that old-timey 80s magic in 4 measly kilobytes.

4k Dungeon Romp has about 750 lines of code, not including comments, and weighs in at 4,093 bytes when compiled from Flash CS4 on Windows to an AS3, FP9 SWF. All graphics are generated and drawn at run-time. There is no sound.

The game came out fairly well concepted from the beginning. The 3D view, overhead automap view, party stats and scrolling text log were all part of the original design. I had originally planned to allow a very limited inventory system (one weapon and one armor), but the text to explain the system and to handle enemy drops cost more bytes than I was willing to spend. Mechanically, the simple level-based system works just as well, even though it’s a little less flavorful. In exchange, I added dynamically-generated textures to the dungeon walls, which seem to really add to the game.

The overhead map was to make it a little more Rogue-like, but also because one of my favorite childhood Wizardry knock-offs, Swords and Serpents, used the split 3D/map view very effectively. I learned in playtesting that people spend 99% of their time looking at the map — when I release a non-4k version of Romp, I’ll adjust the size of the map way down and increase the size of the 3D view to encourage away from that behavior. I’m sure nicer graphics and the like will help too.

The dungeons are all completely randomly generated, again as a throwback to Rogue. A perfect maze algorithm would have been significantly cheaper, but those are really boring, so I used a modification of Jamis’s Dungeon Generator that I’ve been using for years on little things like this and stripped it down even further to save on bytes. I strongly recommend checking Jamis’s generator, it’s really very cool… or you can wait until the non-4k version of Romp is released.

Hardcoded mazes would have been even cheaper still — so much that I could have added an equipment system and an end-game scenario — but I think random mazes are cool. /shrug

I think that’s pretty much it — thanks for playing and I hope you enjoy it as much as I do!

Judge’s Comments

Michael: This is the kind of game that I find myself playing forever, and then coming out of a trance and saying “But why did I play that for so long?” All DungeonRomp is is a maze runner game that you sometimes fight invisible enemies in by choosing from “Attack”, “Heal” and “Run”. That’s it. Somehow, though, the inclusion of that RPG elements makes it like crack for me. My only real complaint is that enemies are randomly difficult with no way to tell what your chance of survival is… and that at its core, the game is pretty repetitive.

Chris: Last thing I was expecting was a nice simplified roguelike. Love the two views of the dungeon, would have been great to see my enemies and find gold in the dungeon. Great to explore, dlvl2 was horrible at clvl 3, total ‘mend’ fest. Impressive to fit it all in 4k.

Panayoti: An RPG in less than 4k! Amazing stuff. I played this longer than any of the other entries. It’s a tad bit ugly, but the gameplay is really compelling despite the simplified mechanics. Dungeon Romp is a very engrossing experience with gameplay that makes you lose track of the time.