Rogue Dungeon was going to be called....Dungeon Dive?!?

Hey all! This past week I've been talking to the team behind Rogue Dungeon, and I've learned some interesting things! With their permission, I'm going to share some of that with you, along with some of Jon's concept art during the creation process.

At one point, they were going to call Rogue Dungeon, Dungeon Dive! I thought that was so cool. Of course they arrived at that name totally independent of the Dungeon Dive channel, but I love that kind of synchronicity. I've felt a connection to this game since I first played it.

Chad provided me a list of names they were going to use before they settled on Rogue Dungeon.

• Wayward Dungeon

• Enter the Catacombs

• Heroes and Hellholes (Chad - Kinda like this one, lol!)

• Heroes and Hellions

• 7 Dungeons

• Stairs of Death

• Descent of Death

• Dangerous Decent

• Perilous Plunge

• Fortunes and Perils

• The Stairs Down

• Down Down Down

• Into the Dark

• Enter the Dark

• Only Down

• Hero's Tales

• Hero's of Legend

• Dungeon Prowler

• Dungeon Stalker

• Tower of Torture (Chad - Tower would make for easy naming but it would limit our events)

• Tower of Torment

Chad reflects on the discussion the team had regarding the name:

"I think Dungeon Dive is a great name for a dungeon crawler. I think we ultimately went with Rogue because we wanted the game to be thought of as a Roguelike.

I remember getting in a fight about what we wanted to name Tales of Illyria: Destinies, I wanted to call it  Tales Of Illyria: Rogue  but I kept spelling it Tales Of Illyria: Rouge. And Jon's final death blow of the idea was when he said dude you don't even realize this whole time you have been fighting to name the game Tales of Illyria: Red Makeup for your Cheeks. 

I was pretty humiliated. 

I did some digging. It seems that Dungeon Dive was Jon's place holder name; he also wanted to use Dungeon Delve.  I have no idea why I didn't want to go with Dungeon Dive. "

I told Chad that I too used to make that Rogue / Rouge mistake, and he felt better.

Chad also had this to say about the design of the first prototype, and provided a couple of very early images he threw together.

• Albert's the one that made this prototype happen, I was doing research into number theory and other nonsense.

• It still had the original card sizes, I wanted different card sizes so that the cards were easy to differentiate. It was really important at one time. Plus I liked that the hero was a big tarot card, and that the dungeon room was a big beefy square.

• It was before we introduced dungeon map cards. Before that you just got the rooms randomly with 5 stair room cards mixed in, It had its strengths but we were never happy that you could have games where you had 3 traders in a row, or 3 staircases in a row or a bunch of traps and then a trader. Basically situations where you got a bunch of rooms at the start that severely made winning almost impossible.  The whole reason for the gem decks and the dungeon maps was to even out the distribution of room types so that you got so many fights per level and so many traps and had a sense what the rooms might be so you didn't have to waste a trader room before you got some loot to trade. 

• This box had a couple dungeon maps prototypes Albert was working with. He's the one that did all the map work. 

Here are some early prototyping images provided by Albert and Chad.

Jon also provided a few images showing his design process.

I hope you enjoyed this little deep dive into the creation of Rogue Dungeon. All of this was really interesting for me to learn about, and I'm happy to be able to share this with you all.