Game Jam to Steam: Unfair Dungeon

Unfair Dungeon is a cruel and simple movement clicker coming to PC in 2026 and it was born from the 72-hour Ludum Dare jam in October, 2025. Play the original web version on itch.io and wishlist on Steam.

September: Kicking Kobolds and One-Hour Prism Games

In September 2025, I released Kicking Kobolds v0.03 and wanted to take a break before the PrismRL engine v1.0 released. To practice prototyping with PrismRL, I ran a couple 1-hr jams using previous Ludum Dare themes.

• Depths: a game about falling down holes and eating snacks. I’m really proud of this one. Developed in ~2.5 hrs total.
• Tiny Creatures: a game about shepherding sheeple and protecting them from woflies. This did not get finished. The multi-tile hero caused a lot of debugging that halted quick iterations.

Unfair Flips & the Move to Godot

Somewhere between the 1hr jams & the beginning of October, Unfair Flips hit my radar and it really clicked with me. I enjoyed the minimalist depth of just flipping a coin, and it reminded me of a random walk, a pathing algorithm that randomly picks a direction. This was the start of Unfair Dungeon. Before the LD jam even started, I started planning. Even if the idea didn’t fit the jam theme, it was a game I wanted to make. It was at this time that I begrudgingly switched from PrismRL to Godot.

• Love2D doesn’t have HTML export support for the pre-release version that PrismRL uses
• Mouse controls and buttons in PrismRL were going to be new for me

Godot was going to be a powerhouse to allow me to move quickly and the web builds would be critical for getting people to actually play.

Ludum Dare 58: Collector

The *Collector *theme was a bit of a stretch for my idea, but I went on anyway. Instead of having the player walk 10 steps, I’d have them walk 5 steps, collect something, then return. The Coin of Rehtaeh is a nod to the Amulet of Yendor and Heather Flowers, the creator of Unfair Flips. I named the game Random Walk.

I submitted the game, and I was really happy with how it turned out. During playtesting, a 6-year-old child cried in frustration, which I thought was a hilarious anectdote. Bluesky got ahold of it and a bunch of people gave it a try. It was so fun to see and hear people talking about playing a game I made. Heather Flowers even saw it, played it, and mentioned it in an interview!

With all kinds of good and kind feedback, I was excited for the Ludum Dare results to come out. I was very, very disappointed to not even break the top 50% of submitted jam games. I knew the game was frustrating (it was meant to be!), but I underestimated how much that might affect how people voted.

Steam Launch

With lots of good feedback and a solid foundation, I decided to make it official and launch on Steam! I did a crash course in game marketing, wrote store text, designed assets, and reached out to an artist for capsule art (not complete yet). I also changed the name to Unfair Dungeon. The Steam page went live just a few days after the jam results came out. Wishlist now!!

It’s surreal to have page on Steam. I’m having a really good time.

Looking ahead…

I want to push deeper into the dungeon crawler theme. The random movement needs some juice, and I think the game can be better with some features and flavor.

• Walls & Obstacles that can affect movement odds
• A prestige mechanic (reset + reward)
• Backtracking & branching paths
• New procedural environments

I want the game to feel like an adventure without losing the core “beat the odds” tenacity.

Bonus!!!

Seriously, go wishlist the game!!

For any math nerds out there, I did some very fun monte carlo simulations in python to help with balancing the web version. Unfair Flips has a few sections where it’s very hard to level up your coin, which is absolutely the most valuable upgrade you can get. Because of that, a normal Unfair Flips run is something like 1-2K flips (I could be wrong). Random walk was balanced so that a playthrough is closer to 300-400 steps. Backtracking and stuff will force me to rebalance and I’m looking forward to setting up more monte carlo simulations. They are so fun and useful!

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