I'm going to have a go at the Dungeon Challenge, and I thought I could produce a game in the time scale required.  I have a confession to make, I have made a dungeon game before.  Deepfall Dungeon was a game I wrote a few years ago and it was a retro style 3d dungeon adventure game.  There are some differences and I am writing this new game from scratch.  I learned a lot from before and I hope to put some of that to use in this project. 

I recently watched Bandersnatch on Netflix and was inspired by the 8-bit dungeon game featured in that movie.  The game is designed for the ZX Spectrum, one of the first machines I owned.  So I decided to re-create a portion of that game which should fall within the remit of the challenge.  I realised that a full game of this type will take a lot of work and time, which because of the strict limits of the challenge, would be difficult to achieve.  I therefore decided to limit my design in the following ways - 

1) A 3d sprite based game, with the look of an 8-bit game.

2) Limited sound effects, music and animation.

3) Limited graphics, often 2-tone to match the aesthetic of 8-bit systems.

4) Gameplay consisting of the bare minimum to make the game playable and fit the challenge.

With this decided upon, I started drawing some wall graphics, again taking inspiration from the on-screen game.  You will see from the screen shot that the maze is divided up into squares and each square can be a solid wall or a corridor.  Therefore we need a wall sprite for each position in relation to the player.  In fact this would be a lot easier to design and program in true 3d but I wanted to do the game in the same manner as the original would have been. The wall pieces are then displayed on top of each other, from furthest the player to nearest.  Monsters and enemies are then placed on top of this scene.  

You will notice the pipes at the top of the screen, again this is just an animated sprite which is over-laid on top.