What is it?
An HTML emulation of old school dungeon crawlers, featuring choose-your-own-adventure elements and point-and-click games from the 90s. Each room is designed using HTML tables with old web graphics inserted to suggest space, architecture, and dimension. They're like digital dioramas. A room has one or more doors leading to other rooms. Descriptive text in the bottom pane provides atmosphere, narrates a vignette, or displays dialogue from characters in the room.
Showcasing Old Graphics
This project is an homage on many levels. Apart from capturing the spirit of old dungeon crawlers and text-based games, I want my dungeon to show off the remarkable animated gifs, clip art, and backgrounds from the old web. These images have qualities of their own and evoke an era worth remembering.
A New Medium
There are primitive examples of similar interactive HTML pages from the early web. However, what I've done is unlike anything else out there: simulating interiors and dimensionsal space through nested tables that utilize graphics and textures. Walls made of black space is a byproduct of the technical limitations of HTML tables, but also a stylistic choice suggesting shadows and achieving a minimalism that works best for interiors. Restricting myself to 90s era HTML with very little CSS is what makes this fun, but also painstaking and time consuming. Designing and creating one room can take hours.
My ambition is to construct a gigantic maze of interconnected rooms, segmented within various "tilesets" or "biomes": a crypt, cemetery, castle, traditional dungeon, a wizard's tower, caves, and magical realms. Each room will generally offer new graphics, characters, and be a self-contained scene while maintaining continuity with previous and successive rooms.
I aim to refine the text descriptions, improve the writing, add dialogue choices, and incorporate a main quest across the entire dungeon. If possible, I would like to implement more gamified interactions: point-and-click mechanics to find items or activate levers, trigger "game over" situations, and suggest choices & consequences like an RPG; all conveyed with basic HTML.
Influences
I grew up with Dungeons & Dragons 2nd edition, cRPG dungeon crawlers like Might & Magic, and adventure games. These have a clear influence on this project, along with a love for old school fantasy culture. But perhaps the most prominent influence is Mind Maze, a trivia game within Encarta 95. The player moved through a series of rooms in a castle, answering trivia questions to progress. Rooms included fascinating characters and decor in a memorable art style that oozed atmosphere.
Meta Layers of Meaning
Embarking on this dungeon project is meaningful in synthesizing multiple aims: 1) showcase early internet graphics and traditional fantasy, 2) explore my own creativity by reusing and recontextualizing these graphics, 3) pay homage to the spirit of dungeon crawlers, 4) make something in the 2020s using old forms like basic HTML, and 5) bring back a simpler interactive experience that encourages imagination. Nothing fancy or noticeably modern in effect. What I am doing with this dungeon project is an ambitious attempt at realizing a cohesive vision: designing a fantasy world with digital assets, coding it myself with HTML, writing the flavor text, and eventually constructing lore and a narrative story that connects it all together.
This is a long work in progress. I'm up to 80 rooms and that number could double or triple. Although a long way from completion, there is much to explore already. Try it out, soak in the atmosphere, and admire the charming graphics made during the old days of the internet.
Mission statement
