WHATASAVINGS

2020-12

Necrodancer is a great game, and has a wonderful community. I’ve been playing the game since it came out, and as a community we’ve held many many racing, speedrunning, and other events. One of these events is “PuzzDOR” (yes, that’s short for “Puzzle Dancer Online Racing”. look, it’s not really supposed to make sense), where community members submit custom puzzle dungeons that the racers then compete to complete.

For PuzzDOR 7, I created WHATASAVINGS, a series of levels where your goal is to kill the shopkeeper on each floor. The levels look randomly generated, but I hand-crafted them so that they would only be beatable using very specific means. If you’ve beaten all-zones mode in necrodancer, you should have enough game knowledge to beat most of the levels in this dungeon – I specifically wanted the solutions to be based on well-known and intended game behavior and interactions, rather than arcane corner cases. I’m pleased with how many fun and creative interactions I was able to use, without seeming unfair, in my opinion. It was nice making a puzzle game where I could assume the players were already well-versed in the puzzle’s many mechanics, with no tutorial necessary!

You can download and play the dungeon here, or watch me and Elad commentate while the racers play it for the first time here: