The Dungeon Under My House Press Page

A family-friendly, non-violent 1st-person role-playing game.

Factsheet

Developer:
GBGames
Based in Des Moines, IA

Release date:
Originally meant to be released by June 30, 2023.
Anticipated Q2 2024 release.

Platforms:
Android
iOS
Windows
Mac
Linux

Website:
https://www.gbgames.com/freshly-squeezed-entertainment/freshly-squeezed-entertainment-the-dungeon-under-my-house/

Regular price:
$0.00

History

At the end of 2021, Gianfranco Berardi was finished with his first Freshly Squeezed Entertainment project, Toy Factory Fixer. He spent the next year working on ports for both Toy Factory Fixer and Toytles: Leaf Raking, participating in Ludum Dare 50, and creating a player’s guide for the new game.

When it came time to identify a next Freshly Squeezed Entertainment project, he came up with a few concepts, but one idea in particular wouldn’t let go.

The Dungeon Under My House started development in earnest in the first week of January of 2023. It’s core design precepts were that there would be no violence, that personalities in the game would be intersecting, and that there would be mystery and adventure. The mood was intended to be light-hearted and family-friendly, inspired by games such as Wizardry, Etrian Odyssey, and Earthbound and the movie The Goonies.

Since Berardi worked on this project part-time, much of the initial work took weeks or months, such as creating a simple 1st-person view based on the raycasting technology featured in games from the late 90s, or allowing the player to customize the characters in the game.

The more important and vital set of tasks involved creating compelling game mechanics to replace the hack and slash mechanics typically seen in 1st person dungeon crawler role-playing games. Rather than merely dressing up violence in non-violent terms, Berardi decided to focus on knowledge acquisition, mainly through conversations with non-player characters.

He was disappointed to learn that the state of the art for conversations in games boiled down branching dialogue and relationship management through gifts. His intent was not to have robotic characters repeating lines each time you talked to them, but instead to have conversation be impactful and meaningful.

By the end of 2023, he had spent a lot of time reading up on philosophy, linguistics, semiotics, theory of knowledge, point and click adventures, interactive fiction games, and more, all in support of creating intelligent characters who can react to the player’s actions and questions in ways that might support compelling game play.

This research of course took a lot of time. The intended release was in six months. As of today, it is still in pre-production.

Features

Customizable characters so that players can see themselves in the game
Party-based role-playing in a grid-based 1st person dungeon
Turn-based movement that does not rely on twitch muscles or speed and can allow the player to play at their own pace
Conversation as the primary method of communicating with characters in and out of the player’s party
An in-game map that the player can modify as they explore the dungeon