Dekrawler
Roguelike Dungeon Crawler / Card Game
- Role
- Solo Designer & Developer
- Status
- Playable Build
- Category
- digital games
Project Overview
- Genre: Roguelike Dungeon Crawler / Card Game
- Core Mechanic: Resource management and risk assessment with a deck of playing cards, where each suit is a verb and the weapon degrades to whatever it last killed.
- My Role: Solo Designer & Developer
- Inspirations: Scoundrel, Balatro
- Status: Playable build on itch.io, Unity 6, PC
Concept
Dekrawler is a single-player roguelike dungeon crawler played entirely with a deck of playing cards. One run is one deck: you draw four cards into a room, resolve them, and move on. Clear every threat in the deck and you win. It builds on the core loop of Scoundrel and its central tension, a weapon that degrades as it kills, and adds a run-to-run meta layer, a thirteen-tier campaign and two additional suits.
Summary
The 52-Card Dungeon (Core Loop)
The game is played in rooms of four cards. You resolve enough of them that one or fewer is left, then you may leave, and the leftovers carry into the next room. Ranks 2 to 10 are their number, J is 11, Q is 12, K is 13 and A is 14. Beyond the four standard suits, Oracle reveals and rearranges part of the deck, and Python hides its face until it is played.
The card language
| Mechanic & Interaction | Suit & Type | Dungeon Element |
|---|---|---|
| Used to clear enemies. Equipping a new weapon discards the old one. | ♦️ Diamonds | Weapons |
| Cleared using Weapons. If the weapon is weaker than the enemy, player takes damage equal to the difference. | ♣️ Clubs | Elite Enemies |
| Restores HP exactly equal to the card's face value. | ♥️ Hearts | Health Potions |
| Cleared without degrading weapons. If fled from, inflicts snowballing direct damage at the end of the room. | ♠️ Spades | Pests / Hazards |
Signature Systems & Mechanics
Weapon Degradation System
Weapons do not simply break, they dynamically scale down. Equip a Diamond and its rank is your weapon power. Kill a Club with it and the weapon locks to that Club's rank, so from then on it can only be used on Clubs of that rank or lower. • Example: killing a Club 7 with a Diamond 10 locks the weapon at 7. This is the whole game. Kill the weakest Club first and your weapon is locked at the bottom, so every Club above it has to be fought barehanded. Kill the strongest first and the ceiling stays high.
The Adrenaline (Combo) Economy
To incentivize aggressive sequencing, Gold generation requires chaining kills of the same target type. The payout multiplier escalates linearly after the 3rd consecutive kill, calculated as:
M = max(1, n - 2)(Where “n” is the consecutive kill streak. Equipping a new weapon, healing, or switching targets immediately resets the combo to zero).
Balancing & Testing (Monte Carlo Simulations)
Balance is measured rather than estimated. The simulator drives the real game engine instead of a separate model of it, so a reading cannot drift from the shipped rules. • Automated simulations: thousands of runs per tier under a scripted policy, reporting clear rates for the bare campaign and for a fully invested loadout. • Iterative tuning: the campaign ladder is authored as rules rather than numbers, and each rule is introduced on its own before it is combined with another.
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