An OSR Video Game, How I Struggle Coding Games + Screenshots, TTRPG Devlog & More

June 06, 2025

An OSR Video Game, How I Struggle Coding Games + Screenshots, TTRPG Devlog & More

Sleepdrifter's Newsletter #10 📜

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Deep forests, giant mountains & weird dungeons. I speak about TTRPGs, video games, music and what I like.
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Summary

🎲 Moldvay’s Labyrinth: An OSR Video Game That Feels Like A Solo TTRPG
🕹️Coding Video Game: And Why I Always Failed Finishing Them + Screenshots
🧙🏼‍♂️What I’m Up To: Breathless Jam Devlog, Coding Video Game, And Other Cool Stuff

🎲 Moldvay’s Labyrinth: An OSR Video Game That Feels Like A Solo TTRPG

The other day, I was doomscrolling on Reddit while I stumbled upon an r/OSR’s thread about an OSR video game with some kind of old-school feeling.
I immediately downloaded the game and tried it.

Moldvay’s labyrinth is a dungeon-crawling game with no graphics except for the image of a town when you are outside, and the images of each dungeon room as you delve into it.
The dungeon is represented with this particular blue background that directly came from OSR modules like B2 - The Keep On The Borderlands.
And that’s it. The battles are text based, and the character sheets are classic TTRPG-style sheets.
And I love it. It feels like playing a solo dungeon crawling TTRPG on paper.

In terms of rules, it is inspired by Moldvay Basic Set and by video games like Wizardry and Bronze Dragon.
The dungeon’s layout is the same each time you play but the rooms are all randomized, so you don't have the same thing each time you start a game. There are 42 handcrafted levels (I haven’t passed the first floor at the moment, the game is hard 😆)
You have a great variety of 12 classes and, of course, you can equip items, use spells, and perform various class-specific actions.

A subtle thing I like when delving deeper into the dungeon is the ability to camp to heal your party and refill your mana. Each time you do this, the dungeon can go darker and restock with new monsters and encounters on your current level.
You can also return to the town and sell your looted stuff, change character if you want, learn spells etc. the way it was in some Roguelike like Angband or even Diablo.

Also, the game includes a game manual presented in the TTRPG format, and this is a pretty nice touch.

It’s simple to understand but hard to master if you’re already used to dungeon crawling in TTRPGs and video games. Expect a lot of hours crawling into the dungeon!

Kudos for Crosscut Games for making such a great game for all the OSR and video game nerds out there!

Moldvay’s Labyrinth is available on Android and iOs for a couple of bucks, and a free edition (kind of a lite edition) is available on iOs and will come soon on Android.
It came with no ads and no data will be stolen/sold etc. It fully works off-line.

🕹️Coding Video Game: And Why I Always Failed Finishing Them + Screenshots

I love coding video games.
That’s something I don’t talk much about, but if you read my stuff, you clearly see that I’m in love with video games from all ages. And it includes: playing them, learning about game design, and coding them.
But I always struggle a lot about something: finishing a playable prototype. The reason can vary (lack of fun, too hard to do, lack of time etc.) but the result is here, I have nothing to show to anyone.

This week, I started 2 new projects, both with the same code base to try various game design ideas:

A grid based game where you are a mage trying to escape a dungeon and you can copy/paste any tile.
The idea can be fun but deserves a lot of game design thinking to be playable
A grid based game (love those, yes) where you are the dungeon master and trying to make the hero lose. In fact, this idea reminds me of Dungeon Keeper, and I started to play it again (I will probably speak about it in the future). The main difference here is that the game is made like old-school Roguelike, but you are not the hero delving into the dungeon, you are the person putting traps, spikes, hidden walls, doors, monsters etc in the hero’s feet.
It works pretty well but deserves a lot of work and time to be really fun, and still a lot of ideas and ways of putting everything.

And, as I’m always inspired to create video games, I started daydreaming about a game similar to Moldvay’s Labyrinth (see the first entry of this newsletter) but with outdoor hex-crawling adventures, with that “paper” feels and procedural generation, the way it is when you hex-crawl solo TTRPGs.
But making video game RPGs takes time and especially when you add heavy procedural generation.

This video shows an early prototype for my Mörk Borg roguelike adaptation called Mörk Rogue. There’s missing sprites (that’s why some seems of). I made the music but the sound is taken from Sil-Q just to get the vibe. Read more below.

You may know that I’m a huge old-school Roguelike lover. Games like Rogue, Nethack, Infra Arcana, Caves Of Qud, and Angband are amongst my favorites, even if they seem hard to understand.
And you know I’m a Mörk Borg fan, I mentioned the game in almost all my newsletters, I made music for it, participate a little in #Mörktober since 2023 and I’m an avid GM of that game.

And both niches can be put together “easily”, and that’s what I’ve done back in early 2024.
I started coding an old-school Roguelike called Mörk Rogue (you can see an image of it beside) and it was a lot of fun, but a lot and a lot of time.
Honestly, the game is pretty playable. There’s a working procedural dungeon, monsters, some classes are even already put into the game (Fanged Deserter and Wretched Royalty for example) and the sprites were hand-drawn by my beloved SO. You can watch all of this in the video up above.
You get various armor, weapons, you can throw your dagger at the enemy, shoot your arrows, some weapons mock you, fumbles and critical hits are handled, etc.
But there’s still a LOT to put to just have all the classes working well, and all the Mörk Borg core mechanics and all the Roguelikes basic ones.

I may finish it one day, because I really love this project and I see from time to time that people in both niches are interested in a product like this.
But man, it feels like a lifelong project to me. And that’s fun because some amazing people are making those kinds of games in one week for the 7DRL Jam (7-Day Roguelike) and this is awesome!

Otherwise, here are some screenshots of various games I tried to make, but weren’t fun enough or are still missing something to continue (like a good story, or game design ideas).

A grid-based game into a procedural labyrinth where you have to find the exit before running out of oxygen or before being killed by yetis. You have to climb all the way to the mountain.

A kind of narrative small open-world game that takes place on a small island where you have to find the way to leave the place. It plays a lot like a point-and-click game where you focus on finding items to progress. I will continue this one but I need a good story.

A Roguelite game, ala Faster Than Light & Into The Breach where you are a captain on a spaceship avoiding all the problems that occur in your randomly generated vessel (mechanics stuff, monsters, etc.) in very short runs.

Yet again an old-school Roguelike where you play as a soldier in a gruesome war, a not so common topic in the Roguelike niche.

For those interested, I work with Godot a free amazing open-source engine, and I make my pixel art with Libresprite an Asprite free open-source fork. So yes, anyone can make a game for free, but that takes a whole lot of time.

🧙🏼‍♂️What I’m Up To: Breathless Jam Devlog, Coding Video Game, And Various Other Cool Stuff

As you may know if you’ve read my last two newsletters, I’m working on an adventure for René-Pier Deshaies/ Fari RPGs’ Breathless Jam 2, a game about a zombie outbreak, and being, well, out of breath.

My adventure is set inside a prison, where the players will play as prisoners who are trying to escape the place where zombies start to break in the penitentiary.

My various tables are now ready, I guess, and I’m heavily working on the prison itself. I have written all the rooms I want with the idea of what’ll be inside of each, and how they’ll be connected.
Now I need to put all of this inside a visual map with a better description for all GMs to understand.
I'll also start working on the layout, though I’m not really sure about the format (one-page, pamphlet, zine etc).
This whole jam has been fun to work on, and I’m working at my own speed on it 🙂

After some Foundry’s server trouble and the classic table booking problem, we finally had a chance to continue our story through Middle Earth in The One Ring TTRPG (I already spoke about it here).
We were in Lond Daer, in search of a special island. We met Queen Nimue who granted us a room to sleep and heal, then spent some time looking for information about the island one of our team members saw in a dark magic inducing dream.
The island is called The Isle Of The Mother and we found a sailor called Eger who can bring us there.

Let’s see what the adventure holds in this evening’s game! 🧝

Wednesday the 28 of May, I went to a rehearsal with my music band. We cover some recent and old-school surf-rock music, mainly for fun. We have a private show scheduled soon and we have a blast playing all this catchy riff.
I play the bass in that project.

Note that this is far from being my first band, as I got various projects along my life, some more serious than others, across various genres (Post-rock, Doom, Atmospheric Sludge, Ambient, Folk, Psyché etc.)

I may speak about it one day. 🎸

Last Saturday, it was our 5th anniversary with my SO. To celebrate this, we went to Maillezais’ Abbey, a beautiful location in the south of Vendée, France.
This place is called Le Marais Poitevin (Poitevin Swamp) and it’s full of water channels across beautiful fields.
It’s more a bucolic place than a grim swamp 😉

We went boating for over 3 hours and it was very pleasant as we came early, before the tourists invaded.

As you may have already read in my previous newsletter, we really want to buy ourselves a van, and we finally found one: great condition, fair price, and with everything we wanted! 😀
We tested it yesterday and we can’t wait to buy it and get it.
That’s one dream come true ☺️

That’s it for this week!

Let me know if you enjoyed this article, if you played/read/watch any of the stuff I mentioned this week 😀

See you next Friday!

Cheers !
Sleepdrifter

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