Catacombs of the Damned!

About the game

Catacombs of the Damned! is a first-person dungeon crawler that runs, remarkably, in smooth 3D on a 128 by 64 pixel screen. You enter the catacombs armed with magic fireballs and try to reach the exit of ten floors, each one generated at random, so no two runs are the same.

Along the way you meet skeletons, mages, bats and spiders, and collect treasure: coins, chests, crowns and more, plus potions to keep you going. At the end, the game tallies your loot and kills into a final score.

Playing it here

This is a homebrew game made for the Arduboy, the open, credit-card-sized handheld with a tiny black-and-white screen: a new game by an independent developer, not a commercial release. It runs here in Ardens, an Arduboy emulator compiled to WebAssembly. Click Play now and choose Start on the title screen.

F2 saves the full state of the emulator and F4 brings it back, which is handy before a tough floor. A gamepad works too. The game has very little text, all in English.

Controls

Key	Arduboy button	Action
Up / Down	D-pad	walk forward / back
Left / Right	D-pad	turn
Hold Z + Left / Right	A + D-pad	step sideways
X	B	throw a fireball
F2 / F4	—	save / load the emulator state

A few things worth knowing

Strafe, don't just turn. Stepping sideways while facing a monster lets you dodge its attacks and keep throwing fireballs.

Fireballs need a moment. There is a short reload between throws, so line up your shot instead of holding the button.

Every run is new. The floors are generated at random each time, so dying is a reason to try again, not to memorise the map.

Credits and licence

Catacombs of the Damned! was programmed and drawn by James Howard and released under the MIT licence. Its 4x6 pixel font comes from a font published under the MIT licence on Hackaday.io, and it uses the Arduboy2 (BSD) and ArduboyTones (MIT) libraries by Scott Allen. The licence texts are linked from this page.