# Overview

Thorngate was part of a friendly jam on a discord server I frequent. There weren’t particularly strong rules here, and my usual artist, Kiri, wasn’t involved, so don’t expect the usual level of polish.

# Design

I ran across a giant heap of battler sprites by Akashics, which got me into the mood to make a gacha. So I did.

With any gacha, we need a reason for our shiny randomly generated units to exist, and this brushed upon the second thing I was into recently: Dungeon builders. And so Thorngate was born.

The goal is fairly simple, you build out your dungeon by placing room blocks, and spend gems rolling shiny new monsters. To gain more gold and gems, you need to attract heroes, which come from stairwells. More heroes = more income, but if they reach the core it’s game over.

So you place your units in rooms to defend them. Each room has a collated HP score from the units inside it, and rooms which lose all their units are “captured”, so new units can’t be placed in them for a while. Thus, the goal is to keep every room “fed” with monsters to protect them from heroes, to roll stronger monsters and build a bigger dungeon, ad nauseum.

As you play, more advanced buildings are unlocked, while heroes become more frequent and powerful.

# Thoughts

I honestly can’t tell if it always played this fast or if something just broke. I think it might be animating at the framerate of my monitor, which would be a silly bug to write but it was 5 years ago!

Gameplay wise, there’s not much to comment on. Like a lot of “builder” games, the initial hook is pretty decent if you’re into this kind of game, but there’s not enough content to really keep you hooked. The usual Jam curse I suppose. But looking at it now, I’m not sure how I’d expand upon it without drastically slowing down the pacing. Jam games tend to be designed into a fast game pace so you can test faster, but also so the limited content doesn’t feel so obvious.

I think the “place rooms” idea ended up working pretty well as a solution to the need for having “imps” that physically build rooms. I remember wanting these at first but quickly realizing I didn’t have the time nor patience to implement them inside the 3 day window.

# Play

You can play it here