Desktop Dungeons in your browser!

Here it is! My HTML port of Desktop Dungeons alpha is done and available on the site of the original Desktop Dungeons. It's free, fully playable, up to the Lothlorien campaign, and works on all recent browsers (Chrome, Firefox 3.6 & over, Safari, Opera and even IE9).

Desktop Dungeons on the web

I started working on porting the free alpha version in April. At that time, only that version was available. QCF Design, the creators, were busy working on their own port (to Unity3D) that they quickly showed during E3. They then published the new version as private beta, open to people pre-ordering the full game. Of course, their goal is to make a polished game, exploiting all the possibilities of the design, that can be played on a large array of devices. The alpha was done with GameMaker and could only be run on Windows and MacOSX. And that's why I did the port: I wanted to make it available to a larger public (for instance Linux users).

After a few months of after-work coding, I showed my progress to the nice people of QCF Design, and they agreed to send me the GameMaker code, so that I could make the port as faithful as possible. And they even agreed to deploy it on their site once finished. How cool is that!

I did all the coding with JavaScript and mostly HTML4 (using DOM for graphics), but a few features need HTML5: audio support and localstorage to save your progress across levels and classes. For the record, the whole game is about 10k lines of JavaScript and took me six months to code. It might seem long for a simple game like that, but as I said, I could only put a few hours in it now and then. And the mechanics and contents are quite rich: almost twenty hero classes with strange powers, ten gods with different tempers, ten spells and lots of possible items available in shops.

Go play it and tell me or the forums what you think!

In a future post, I'll cover my development tools, just in case someone is interested.