Do you know what’s great? Zelda! Everyone loves Zelda, especially 90’s Zelda, with the evolution from the top-down, dungeon-crawling adventures of A Link to the Past, to the 3D open-world/time travelling ventures of Ocarina of Time. I, along with many others have a super soft spot for the former, admiring the sprawling dungeon ventures all set within a charming 8 bit, 2D pixel art world. It’s a great style visually and mechanically, offering lots of potential for dynamic gameplay elements and general wholesome adventure fun. But what if you could make your own dungeons to explore?
How does designing and sharing your own Zelda-like inspired dungeons sound? Well with Super Dungeon Maker, you finally can. For those like me, novel game designers looking to expand their skillset and creativity, this might be the perfect option.
What is Super Dungeon Maker?
Super Dungeon Maker is a colourful, pixel art dungeon editor inspired by the best 2D adventure games, such as the classic Zelda games. Users can boot up Super Dungeon maker and from the get-go, create a dungeon of their dreams, for others in the community to play, or just to live out your own wildest dungeon escapades. You can choose many levels, enemies, secret rooms, traps and items you want in a dungeon, ranging from simple, straightforward affairs with steady combat, sweet loot and the odd pitfall to jump over. Or go incredibly outlandish, with dozens of deadly enemies, plenty of hidden traps, secret rooms and much more.
In recent years, level editors and game design software have become more and more commonplace. Those that tend to stand out are the easiest and most effective in creating all ranges of levels and even whole games. Super Dungeon Maker has big shoes to fill but could be promising nonetheless.
Chicken and the Egg
Super Dungeon Maker straight away gets players exploring a pre-made dungeon and getting an idea of what to expect. After a short tutorial in the deep-end, players will be able to explore a small town, which acts as a hub world/interactive menu for creating and playing other people’s levels.
Upon leaving the introduction, you are greeted with a sandbox tutorial, triggered by entering a literal sandbox. Here, you’ll learn the basics of designing your levels. Completing a series of tasks that will see you remove walls, build doors, create paths over bottomless pits and most importantly, place an end goal. This is represented by a large Golden Egg, that when touched will end the level.
Through this learning curve, I will admit I was lost at many moments. The main issue with the beginning stages of Super Dungeon Maker is that the developers have done a rather poor job at basic guidance.
Beginning with the first dungeon which acts as a prologue, there are no signs or notes on even the basic controls. The options menu offers no control mapping nor does it even give you an idea of the core functions. You’re kind of left to your own devices and that’s okay, but when something such as a simple jump over a gap is not explained, you’re just leaving people to make countless mistakes on other things.
The sandbox tutorial fares only a little better but feels painfully half-arsed. Some of the instructions are fine and clear, but others don’t explain even some of the simple editing functions, let alone the more advanced ones, such as logic for certain items. It’s messy to put it kindly, but in all honestly, the basic controls and design principles are not that hard to learn by yourself. After a couple of hours, it flowed naturally, but this could be shortened down, with some better guidance.
Breaking some eggs
The two main features you’ll be using in Super Dungeon Maker will be of course the Level Editor and Shared Levels that you can play. Everything is fairly straightforward and easy to grasp, despite the lack of guidance.
The editor itself has a friendly UI and clear options, displaying everything from floor tiles, breakable walls, enemies, key items and more. You have to layout your environment of course and then places everything once a room or a set of rooms are built.
There are limits in place for the scale and number of items each room can contain (obviously, you don’t want a room where the entire floor is breakable), but the limit is still high enough so you can create epic-sized dungeons, filled with multiple rooms, paths leading back to the central room, shortcuts, and hidden rooms. There’s enough here to play around with and I gather more will be added in.
I really like the selection of death traps, enemies, and the use of special items, such as switches for opening certain gates. Everything is aesthetically very colourful, while the tile system, where the world is a built-in measurement of a tile by tile is extremely easy to navigate and learn.
I decided to go big, and while there were some annoyances with placing doors (as they require a space of 3 tiles between doors and there was no mention of this in the tutorial), I was relatively successful. Thanks to the basic “quality of life” features any good editor should have, i.e., a play feature so you can see how a room is before making any needed changes.
There could be more implemented though, such as basic info on enemies and death traps. You can alter the behaviours of certain traps and enemies, but not all sadly. It would have been nice to change certain attributes, especially when it comes to say, a certain jumping spider enemy, which moves around so fast, I can see this being an enemy many people will dislike.
But what is on offer to fill your dungeon with is solid, including some neat items that can make for some epic arenas or even a half-decent puzzle. I made a giant maze filled with dozens of floating eye enemies which shoot a laser out when they spot you. Things like this are possible and you can go even further.
But the most important thing is, you can make dungeons like an old-school Zelda game, and that’s the point with Super Dungeon Maker. Even with the basic tools and logic, you can create some really engaging dungeons, whether they’re more focused on exploration, combat, or simple puzzles. I can certainly see more items being added in and I do really hope this is the case.
Bosses would be a great idea to include, more types of gates to unlock and key items to encourage exploration. I would also say that maybe helping new designers with a simple template is a nice idea too.
Overall?
Super Dungeon Maker has a solid foundation and a good start to becoming something incredible. The lack of guidance at the beginning is really annoying and if the full game releases with the current roaster of items and logics, then I can see this dying out quickly. But I have a great feeling about this, and with updates, new content and a patch to work in better tutorials, I can see Super Dungeon Maker is a must-have for any inspiring game/level designer.
++ Nice, simple UI and layout to designing levels
+ Good selection of items, tiles and logic (if not a lot on offer)
+ Visually pleasing, sounds great and easy to control
-- Lack of guidance is annoying
- Adding in certain logic could help make more meaningful dungeons
- Hopefully, more content will be added
A Steam early access key for Super Dungeon Make was provided for the purpose of this preview
