Building dungeons, brick by brick
One shared grid, a box of snap-together pieces — and a small trick that means the ruins you explore are the same pieces you'll get to build with.
Devlog #03, and this time we're going underground. Eldoria has places you'll descend into — old, dim, not entirely friendly — and the question behind all of them is a boring-sounding one with a fun answer: how do you build a dungeon without building every dungeon by hand? The answer is a box of bricks.
One grid, a lot of pieces
Instead of sculpting each room as a one-off, we build a modular kit: walls, floors, columns, stairs, arches, big stone blocks — every piece designed to the same grid, so they click together cleanly no matter how you stack them. Snap a few walls to a floor, drop in a doorway, run a staircase up to the next level, and a room appears in minutes instead of days.
The grid is the whole point. Because everything shares it, nothing ever nearly lines up — no half-pixel seams, no gaps to patch by hand. Build a wall once, use it a thousand times.
Same brick, three states
Here's where it earns its keep. Every piece comes in a few flavours: intact, damaged, and ruined — clean and cared-for, cracked and worn, or half-collapsed with things growing through it. So the same kit can be a pristine hall or a crumbling wreck, and as the world quietly comes apart, we can dial a place anywhere along that line without a whole new set of assets.
Bricks that do something
Not every piece just sits there. Doors swing, torches actually throw light, gates drop, and the occasional trapdoor opens under your feet (sorry in advance). Those live as little self-contained pieces too, so we can drop a working door or a trap into a layout the same way we drop a wall — it just arrives knowing how to behave.
And the neat part — you'll build with them too
This is the bit we got a little excited about. The kit that makes the ruins you explore is the same kit you'll build with back at the Sanctuary. Walk through a collapsed hall, clock a column or a stretch of wall you recognise — then go raise your own. Exploring and building stop being two separate vocabularies; it's one set of pieces, used both ways.
Why build it this way
Three reasons, really:
Speed — a small team can dress a whole space in an afternoon, then move walls around until it actually plays well.
Consistency — one kit means one visual language. Everywhere you go feels like the same world built by the same hands.
Performance — repeating the same pieces lets the engine batch them together, so a big, detailed space stays cheap to draw. It's the same instancing trick behind the lake tiles in our water system — and it's a big part of how the whole streamed world stays smooth even on modest hardware.
What's next
From here it's two roads. One is dressing — props, light, sound, the little touches that turn a tidy grid of rooms into somewhere you'd hesitate to walk into alone. The other is handing the kit to you: getting the Sanctuary build mode to the point where you can snap these same pieces together and make the place your own. We'll show both as they come together.
That's a wrap on #03. Mind the trapdoors.
More devlogs
What would you build?
Swing by the Discord and tell us — a cosy little hideout, a deathtrap of a dungeon, a tower that's mostly stairs. We read everything, and the good ideas have a way of sneaking into the game.