Dungeon Invaders

DI was created by John Bruneau and Elton Sanchez in 2004 and was the largest game project either of us had undertaken at the time. We wanted to combine a game like Legend of Zelda with Doom but have more of a sci-fi narrative and theme. The game consists of six levels with a unique look to each and culminates in a final boss battle. The player must interact with NPCs both to buy and sell weapons and items, and complete tasks in order to move to the next level. In December of 2004, Dungeon Invaders was exhibited in a small showcase for the Department of Computer Science at San Jose State University. Special thanks to Chris Pollett for all the help and guidance along the way.

Download Dungeon Invaders
Requirements: PC with DirectX

Development

The game was developed in C++ and Open GL using some libraries from Rudy Rucker’s now defunct POP framework. One of the things we were most proud of was during production was we developed our own very rudimentary level editing tool to help us design the levels. The game relied heavily on windows graphics and direct sound libraries which now are very hard to come by and have prevented me from being able to recompile and make simple bug fixes. If we ever revisit this game we essentially will have to rebuild it from the ground up.

Dungeon Invaders is no longer a game still under development. But if it was, here is what we would be working on:

Making advancing trough levels less expensive:
100 Tiles seams a bit too much to ask for in this economy.

Smaller music files:
MP3s would be nice. As it stands they are huge WAVs so we did not include them. If you want to geek out you can make a folder called “res” and in it make five WAV files with music of your choosing. Call them “level1.wav”…etc.

The Box

Make sure you check the box for controls and features!

This game represents an ambitious undertaking on behalf of John Bruneau and Elton Sanchez. We aimed to create a fully immersive, professional level PC game. We broke genera boundaries by combining the action elements of popular 3D shooters with the adventure elements of quest and RPG games. This project has cost us our health, sleep, relationships, and our livelihoods but it was worth it, because in the given limited time we had, we strived for the impossible, and when you strive for the impossible… good things happen.

- The Back of the Box (John Bruneau and Elton Sanchez)