“To me, everything above € 200.000 would be madness.” That’s Briganti co-founder and long time #BelgianGamesIndustry member Karel Crombecq, a few hours after Dungeon Alchemist smashed its initial Kickstarter goal. Shy of a month and a lot of YouTube ads later, the project had amassed a very cool € 2,4 million.
Funds aplenty for the team – Dungeon Alchemist was cooked up by programmer Karel Crombecq and artist Wim de Hert – to really start building the AI-powered map generator of their dreams. One of the most heavily wishlisted Belgian video game projects in recent memory hits Steam today. The team made a lot of promises on the way (stretch goals never forget!), but we’re quite confident that Dungeon Alchemist has everything to become a roleplayer’s wet dream.
The brilliance of the tool is the breeziness with which you’re able to create maps to support your adventures. The ease with which rooms, objects and terrain magically pop into existence by simply drawing a shape and picking a theme feels satisfyingly reminiscent of games like Townscaper and Cloud Gardens. Laying the groundwork for your setting is super fast, but after that you can unleash your inner interior decorator and tweak everything, so it fits your story and characters perfectly.
Because that’s exactly why this has been such an amazing success story. Dungeon Alchemist gives you the means to amplify your storytelling and immerse your party in a way that was virtually impossible or at least painstakingly time-consuming before. And that’s precisely why the project still has a bright future ahead of it: there will always be creative storytellers.
This isn’t just a great idea, it also has been executed with the highest regards of quality and detail – just take a good look at the Dungeon Alchemist logo to see what we’re talking about. There’s thousands of high-quality 3D-assets to play and there’s just so many features that all serve the same goal: make it as easy as possible for you to create your maps, print them or export them to the virtual table-top interface of your choice and start having fun with your friends.