Dungeon Team: the Challenges of Creating a PvE Tactics Game
Wakefield Studios' Robert Lombardo joined us to talk about the Dungeon Team game, explaining how the idea originated, the challenges they have faced, and what they want to achieve with the game.
Introduction
I'm Robert Lombardo, a software engineer and lead developer of Dungeon Team. I also made the flash games The Appalese Wall and War of the Shard. Wakefield Studios was started in 2013 for the release of The Appalese Wall.
I've been evolving the same game engine for each of my titles. Dungeon Team was all about moving from Flash to HTML5, adding real-time synchronous PvP, moving away from top-down single-player storytelling in favor of an endless procedurally-generated dungeon crawl.
Dungeon Team
Dungeon Team's game mechanics are inspired largely by the ASCII rogue-like Ancient Domains of Mystery (ADOM), and I wanted to harken to that genre while still keeping some modern elements like skeletal and frame-based animations.
The game engine powering Dungeon Team is 100% proprietary and written in JavaScript (slowly being migrated to TypeScript), tho it was originally in ActionScript 3. To be honest, the code & architecture are a hot mess, as this all started before I had any professional engineering experience.
I will probably spend the rest of my life paying off the tech debt incurred over 4+ years of amateur development. Maybe worth noting that Dungeon Team also supports real-time synchronous PvP, but since the Kongregate launch, there have never been enough players online concurrently for that to be much fun. We'll get there.
In 2017, I soft-launched Dungeon Team on Kongregate, where it got good ratings, but unfortunately, due to said lack of engineering skill, it was not able to handle traffic at any scale. The project was tabled until 2023, when I tried to revive it with a Kickstarter that didn't succeed. In 2024, I decided to publish it on Steam just to see what would happen.
It's gotten pretty good reviews and engagement/monetization metrics that are close to having a profitable business on my hands, but alas, a bit more product work is still needed, and nothing could be clearer to me now than the fact that I have no skill nor even the inclination to do any kind of marketing. So if you know anyone with marketing chops who's looking for a game designer/engineer to partner with, please send them my way.
Conclusion
Talking about popularity in platforms, it would be just Windows for Steam, and on the web. Ratings on Steam have been pretty consistent with the ratings from the Kongregate launch, but monetization has been significantly better. I've yet to put many resources into driving traffic to dungeonteam.com, but the monetization metrics are the poorest there.
I've never tried to make a publishing deal for Dungeon Team, mainly because I've never felt the product was ready. Maybe I should start looking into that now, since it's so close. I feel pretty certain Dungeon Team still has quite a bit of unmet potential.
The main thing I've learned so far is that there is a great deal more to a game project (esp. a multiplayer one) than product development, and that product development is about the only skill set I really have. More than anything, Dungeon Team & any future projects need a proper team behind them to be successful.
