Dungeon

Co-Creator, Level Design, Puzzle Design, Programming

December 2020 to February 2022

Made by: Emma Higgins and Jake Ruckman

Dungeon is a 3-4 hour puzzle/platforming experience made in Minecraft. It’s inspired by Zelda dungeons, and thus focuses heavily on environmental puzzles, forcing the player to truly understand the 3D space. This is accomplished with the mechanism of the two switches, which each have two states (for a total of four states) that block off access to certain areas and grant access to others. You have to know when to flip the switches and what route to take to gain access to new areas and slowly untangle the knot that is the dungeon. Eventually, you gain a crossbow which allows you to shoot the switches from far away, opening up the complexity of figuring out where you have to shoot the switch from. All this puzzling is broken up by parkour, and is capped off by a final boss who wields the switches against you in a constantly shifting arena.

We made Dungeon over the course of over a year, playtesting it numerous times with both our friends and random people on the internet. This taught us how to make all of the elements of our puzzle more obvious and memorable while not giving away the solution. We constantly tweaked the switches and the platforming sections to make them as intuitive as possible.

Dungeon was my first foray into making a large project with another person, so it inevitably led to some disagreements. I wanted a more pure puzzle experience, while Jake, my co-creator, wanted to include more tension and action. We had to have a discussion about both of our intentions, and we realized that we could use action elements to create puzzles and make puzzles more interesting. To this day, I use the techniques I learned from Dungeon of having big picture discussions in order to solve minor design disagreements amongst team members.