Software Products Dungeon Joe
Dungeon Joe: A Touch-focused Strategy Game
Roam the 10x10 Dungeon in search of the Hidden Treasure and the Damsel in Distress.
Keep an eye out for the Magic Sword, which you will need to slay the Dragon, the Crystal Ball, with which to see the contents of Adjacent Rooms, and the Enchanted Rope, which will save you if you fall into a Pit. Beware the Wyverns who fly about the Dungeon and may carry you off to another room at any time. Go in Good Health, return Wealthy and Victorious!
Screenshots
About the Game
Goals
You have a few seemingly simple goals: Collect the booty and slay the dragon, all before your health runs out.
Dungeon Rooms
Your character is Dungeon Joe, and you are roaming around a dungeon with a hundred rooms, connected in a 10 by 10 grid. Thus, each room has 4 adjacent rooms to which you may exit. The room locations are denoted with a letter and a number, similar to a spreadsheet (i.e. D4 is row D, column 4).Obstacles
Enter a room with a pit without the magic rope and you die.
Enter the dragon's lair without the sword and you die.
Fail to find and slay the dragon before your health runs out and you die.
The dungeon is populated with wyverns (bat-like dragons) that move continuously around the rooms and will carry you to a random room if they find you, or if you find them. You might get lucky and end up in the room with the treasure, but you might just as easily end up in the dragon's lair!
Tools
Fear not, there are tools to be found which can aid you in your journey. When you find one of them in a room, just tap (or click) on it to take it.
If you have the Magic Rope and you fall into a pit, simply tap (or click) on the rope and the pit will be magically removed from the dungeon, and the rope will be hidden in another random room, where it may be found again.
If you have the Crystal Ball, hang on to it until you find yourself in a real pinch. When you tap (or click) on the Crystal Ball, you'll mystically be able to see the four rooms adjacent to you and their contents.
Nearby Item Indicators
Surrounding the room display during game play are a number of indicators that tell you what's in the rooms adjacent to you, and what you have with you.
To the right side of the room display, you see warnings about nearby Pits, Wyverns and the Dragon. Remember that even though there may be multiple Pits and/or Wyverns surrounding you, there is only one indicator for each. There is only one Dragon.
To the top of the room display, you see the booty you've collected or cutout slots if the Damsel or Treasure happen to be adjacent to you.
To the left of the room display, you see the tools you have collected or cutout slots if the Rope, Crystal Ball or Sword are nearby.
Health
At the beginning of each level, Joe enters dungeon in good health. This runs down continuously, as the meter at the top of the screen during game play reminds you.
Levels
Pits are never placed adjacent to each other, there is always at least a room between them. The same goes for wyverns, though once gameplay begins, they begin wandering from room to room of their own accord so you may later find them in rooms adjacent to each other.
Also, the Dungeon Master was fair enough to place the Magic Rope in the room with Joe at the beginning of each level, since it's always possible that multiple pits could surround your random starting room.
As soon as you slay the Dragon on a given level, you move to the next level.
Score
The score for each level is calculated from your remaining health (100 at the start of the level), plus 500 points each for the Treasure and the Damsel if you were lucky enough to find them, multiplied by the level number just completed.The scores for all completed levels are added to arrive at your current or final score. This makes the maximum possible score 11,000.
TIP: Remember that the booty figures heavily into your score, so even if you've found the Sword and the Dragon, if you have enough health to keep searching for the Damsel and the Treasure, its well worth searching for. Just note the location of the Dragon, find some or all of the booty, and then return to slay the Dragon.
About the Technology
The goal was to create a casual, touch-focused strategy game that was easy to hop into and out of whenever you have time. And specifically, we wanted something tactile that showcased the tablet's touchscreen interface.
Dungeon Joe was written specifically for the Blackberry Playbook using Adobe's Flex and AIR technologies along with Futurescale's own PureMVC Framework, aided greatly by its State Machine Utility.
These are the tools we use everyday to solve business problems for enterprise clients, simply applied to a different realm. Game developers have long questioned whether the tools used by business developers were applicable to the realm of gaming. What the development of this game has shown us is that Flex, AIR and PureMVC are not inappropriate or 'too heavy' for use in a game development environment.
The desktop version of Dungeon Joe which you can install and run from the badge on this page, is 100% the same codebase as the Playbook version, it is just packaged for the desktop, via the beauty of AIR.
Note that in a touch-focused game, we don't want complex interactions. Tapping items
to take or use them, swiping the big room to navigate; these are about
as complex as we want the interactions to be. No drill down menus, or
tiny areas that are hard to hit. The simplicity of this interface is its strength. You watch the warnings and the room location and let them guide your navigation. You take tools, and use them when you need to with minimal interaction. This lets you focus on beating the clock to achieve the goals on each level.
Even (perhaps especially) with free software, security is extremely important. The desktop version of Dungeon Joe is code-signed by Futurescale and verified by Thawte, our certificate issuer. If you install the app from here or elsewhere, be sure that Futurescale, Inc is identified as the verified publisher. Never install code that isn't signed and verified by a trusted certificate issuer.
Dungeon Joe on the HP TouchSmart
Playbook Version
Desktop Version
Desktop Note
The 'finger-swipe' navigation used on a touchscreen translates to 'click-and-drag' on the desktop, unless you have a touchscreen computer such as the HP TouchSmart.
Have fun.