Crawl of the Beholder

Crawl of the Beholder is a browser prototype of a classic grid-stepping, first-person dungeon crawler in the style of Eye of the Beholder and Dungeon Master. It uses monster sprites, tiles, spell data and vault maps from Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, so the dungeon is populated with hundreds of monsters, items, and spells right out of the box.

Like most of my recent projects, this one was vibe coded. The behaviour scenarios and the high level specs do most of the heavy lifting; the AI fills in the rendering, combat math, monster AI, and the UI.

The current build ships 38 procedurally-assembled floors spanning the entire DCSS branch progression — Dungeon, Orc, Lair, Swamp, Shoals, Snake Pit, Spider Nest, Slime Pits, Crypt, Elven Halls, Vaults, Depths, Realm of Zot — plus the four Hells (Gehenna, Cocytus, Tartarus, Dis), the Abyss, Pandemonium, the Tomb, and seven portal vaults (Ossuary, Ice Cave, Bailey, Volcano, Necropolis, Desolation, the deep-elf WizLab). About 280 monsters and 200+ DCSS monster spells are wired in, so endgame fiends actually hurl damnation, ancient liches torment, royal mummies summon undead, and stone giants throw crystal spears. Twenty-five DCSS gods grant real boons. The party hunts the Orb of Zot Soup.

Play it in your browser: Crawl of the Beholder.

Download a self-contained build to run offline: crawlofthebeholder.zip (~2 MB — unzip and open index.html from a local web server).

The source is on GitLab.