In the Eye of the Commando

Ten years ago, a rogue-like game called Dungeonmans was released on Steam. It was first introduced to me by a friend I’d met through my time streaming on Twitch. Dungeonmans tries to stick to the traditional Berlin interpretation of the genre without intimidating players who are not familiar with proper rogue-likes. Dungeonmans has bright, colorful, and comedic sprite work, a soundtrack with plenty of bombast by industry legend Zircon, and plenty of well-written jokes. Not to mention the visual gags. The loop of Dungeonmans fits into the tropes of the genre. You start each run fresh with a whole world to explore and discover, with both randomly generated dungeons and an over-world helping the runs stay fresh. You embark on a quest to topple evil as a member of the Adventurer Academy, with the goal of crushing monsters, being a doer of good, and looting plenty of money. With each run, the academy is built up. The school gives the game some macro progression, allowing the player to start with optional bonuses or store loot they find for later. You can even train fire-breathing chicken familiars. They even released a "Pay2Lose" DLC that still makes me chuckle to this day. I wholeheartedly recommend Dungeonmans if you are looking for a deep and approachable rogue-like.

However, this is not the topic for today. If you’d like to hear more about Dungeonmans, I interviewed Jim, the developer, about it a few years back. Here’s a link: https://youtu.be/JXv8hQguGCI

Dungeonmans on Steam

Crush monsters and get loots in the classic turn-based style of deep dungeons and high adventure! Grow the Dungeonmans Academy, a bastion of learning that expands as you play. Serious gameplay with a light-hearted atmosphere, combining the feel of history’s great RPGs and dice-slinging adventures around the tabletop.

STEAM

Today, I want to talk a bit about Jim’s next game. I should note that my longtime friend and artist, Cooler_SK, who has done a lot of work for me over the years, is working on assets for this project. I just wanted to get that disclosure out of the way before I say anything else.

Eye of the Commando, a turn-based dungeon crawler with handcrafted levels, releases Tuesday, September 17th on Steam in Early Access. It’s an ’80s action cheese fest that mashes up the best of movies from the era in a blender, leaving piles of nacho cheese so thick in its wake that you can smell it! Simply put, if you enjoy a good film reference in a world full of nameless commando adversaries, you play as a shirtless lad with perfect hair and a lot of steroids. The soundtrack kicks hard with chunks of the Sega Genesis. If these are good and you also like turn-based dungeon crawlers, then this is something you have to stop and look at.

The game has several starting classes to choose from, each with a few unique starting perks and stats. As you traverse the sometimes puzzle-like levels, you find new weapons and pickups that help you level up and deal more damage. What makes this game stand out is that, at a glance, it looks like a pixelated third-person shooter with a shockingly well-animated butt animation that is hard to miss while you stare at the character model. The gameplay boils down to dodging projectiles by strafing. You aim at your targets with the mouse, as you would in any shooter, with the twist of having to obey the rules of a turn-based dungeon crawler. Recent titles I have played, such as Islands of the Caliph, The Legend of Grimrock, StarCrawlers, and Cryptmaster, were real-time. Now that I think about it, calling Grimrock recent is a bit silly. Aside from StarCrawlers, these games were real-time, meaning it was up to the player's spatial awareness to dodge and avoid. Being turn-based, Eye of the Commando has the advantage of allowing the player time to stop and think about the mistakes they’ve made and wonder, "Why did I walk into a hallway knowing I’m trapping myself in a corner?" After pondering that mistake, you are swiftly gunned down and left to restart.

The first major area the player explores is a tropical island with a volcano in the distance. The second zone is a green forested area that takes place at night. The game over screen gives you an idea of the remaining zones. New areas bring new threats and upgrades. In between each zone there is a shop where the player can buy new upgrades, weapons and health items.

However, spend your funds wisely, because if you lack the firepower, there is no chance you’ll make it to the end of the level. Exploring and finding these medals is key to victory. Learning the level layouts and best routes is half the fun of a dungeon crawl like this. The game’s mini-map can even be disabled if you truly enjoy suffering.

After spending a few hours with Eye of the Commando, I can say that most of my issues with it are closer to issues with the genre than the game itself. It does not have an FOV slider at the moment and has a rather large sprite in the middle of the screen. This causes me some mild nausea after an hour or so of play. While this can be addressed by the developer, these are issues I encounter with just about every dungeon crawler. The sudden, swift, smooth movement of looking around and harsh grid sliding can make me feel ill. There are ways to remedy this, such as making the player sprite in the middle of the screen opaque or shrinking it down a bit. Allowing players to widen the FOV, like in Cryptmaster, or even removing the smooth movement transitions in favor of an alternative with instant screen changes could help prevent motion sickness caused by the room spinning around the player.

Issues with dungeon crawlers aside, I do enjoy and actively seek out these games. Jim has created a unique blend of puzzle-infused dungeon crawling with the bullet-dodging action of something akin to Doom or Serious Sam. Now that I think about it, I’d play a Serious Sam mod for this in a heartbeat! It helps that I enjoy ’80s action cheese and go out of my way to find films from that era I have not seen before.

I reached out to Jim and asked him if he’d be interested in doing a short interview about this release, and he agreed!

Could you write a brief pitch for Eye of the Commando and introduce yourself?

I'm Jim and I make games about crushing monsters and taking their stuff. This one is a turn based grid movement dungeon crawler, like Wizardry or Legend of Grimrock, but with an 80s action movie theme. It's got an early 90s visual asthetic, plays great with a controller, and the Early Access build is a complete adventure with bad guys, mazes, loot, bosses, and puzzles too.

•The main thing that reminds me this is an Adventure Pro game is the sense of humor. 80S action movies are a great trope but its got me wondering, Why this particular setting?

I missed out on April's Ludum Dare this year and decided to run a jam of my own. The pitch was to make a game themed on the arcade games that were inspired by 80s action movies. Think Ikari Warriors, Mercs, Contra, Heavy Barrel, Dynamite Duke, all those type of games. Now make something themed on that type of game. So not just another shooter, but maybe a puzzle game, a racing game, a shop simulator, something with unique mechanics that is still themed on macho muscle heroes machine-gunning their way through crowds of Nondescript International Terrorists.

Eye of the Commando is your second release on steam in ten years. Its also quite the departure from your previous work Dungeonmans. What drew your focus to hand crafted levels and puzzle focus rather than procedural generation? (I did forget demon truck)

Hey don't forget about Demon Truck! Though that came out under the Triger Mountain label. And Tangledeep was a big effort too – that's Andrew's game for sure, but I helped him get it over the finish line and built up the Switch version as well. But yeah, I do procgen stuff all the time, I love it, I just wanted to try something different. Level design is a whole craft, you use pieces of it if you're doing procedural stuff correctly, but there's something special to hand building encounters. My first AAA job, in 2004, was working on Quake 4, and I worked with level designers to hand build combat areas and encounters. It's fun.

Not all dungeon Crawlers are turn based some are real time, Was the game turn-based from the start or did you ever consider real time?

Turn based from the start. Just seemed like a really fun theme to make turn based. It's not too different from the pace of the arcade games either. In those games, the bad guy bullets travel at the slowest speeds, so human players with joysticks can dodge them, but the player bullets zip along at the speed of freedom. So EotC really isn't all that different.

While building the levels, did you have any specific crawlers that you looked to for inspiration?

I'm trying to avoid being too specific about where I draw inspiration from because so many puzzles are bespoke, and they don't always translate well. Some of my favorites though have been Stranger in Sword City, Shining the Holy Ark, and The Dark Spire. But I also need to give a shout out to Dragon Ruins – that's a recent release, and the scale / scope of the game was small enough that I could knock it out in two hours, all on stream. Super fun. That's the game that inspired me to finally make EotC happen.

Eye of the Commando is using the game Engine Godot. Have you worked with this engine before? What made you decide to go open source?

I used Godot for a couple of game jam games before and I just felt like it was time to make the switch. Unity is a fine engine, as is Unreal, and I'm well versed in all three of them at this point, as well as XNA. Right now Godot fills the needs of the project. It's also a lot of fun to work in. On a personal level, there's a number of Godot faithful in the Dungeonmans community and they've been a huge help to getting the game done. The community members often inspire each other.

How long do you plan to be in Early access and what are your Hoping to focus on during the time you have to develop it?

I'm feeling 12 months, accounting for some time off this December and a few weeks out of next year too. No promises, you know how schedules go. As for my focus, what I want to focus on is community building. Finding the players who enjoy EotC, are into the idea of Early Access, and want to make the game the best it can be.

The final product might be markedly different from where we are today. I'm excited for that. I have an idea of what the audience is going to find enjoyable in the game but as I gather up feedback I'm open to new ideas and directions. There may be a procedural level aspect. Maybe we lean harder into the roleplaying, or maybe it becomes even more arcadey. We'll see!

Let's end it off with something fun, What is your favorite action movie?

My personal favorite is The Running Man, because it's got all the Arnold you need and a whole bunch of other star power too, including Richard Dawson chewing up the screen and being amazing. Absolutely top shelf in that role. But, I gotta also give a nod to my favorite BAD action movie, which is The Eliminators. Oh boy. That game could be a blobber dungeon crawler all by itself, watch the trailer and see them list the party members. It's terrible but enjoyable. Honorable mention for so-bad-its-good goes to Gymkata.

Keep an eye out for this commando Launching Tuesday on steam in Early Access.

YouTube is on a slow down trend but still up vs recent months. I got 101,663 views in the last 7 days. That is down from 114,950 views last week. Not going to complain, However I do need to work get to work on the next bigger projects. Views on Twitch are also down this week. From 188 average to 150 average. Still within normal realms and nothing out of the ordinary. I feel like the recent fort got dull quick for some people.

I expect to take Friday off this week. I want to start diving into editing the next major video project and that is when I plan to start. Expect streams from Tuesday - Thursday this week.