Perhaps more than any other PC game, Bard's Tale shaped my childhood -- lots of fond memories playing the game late into the night with my friends, graph paper in hand, agonizing over every battle decision, terrified that the party might perish and we'd lose all our gold. That said, I always wished there were more to the game, and frankly BT II and BT III were disappointments to me in many ways. I've always wanted to create a "better" game that recreated the feel but had better mechanics. I've spent many iterations over the years thinking about what I would have done differently in that regard.

I've recently found myself with some extra time, and I wanted to sharpen my axe with modern AI tools. So, I'm building a dungeon crawler. It's more work than I expected, really; lots of details to iron out. But I have a working prototype, and I'd love your opinion: is this something worth finishing, is it the kind of game real people want to play these days. The prototype is at www.dungeoncrawler.app. It will prompt you to give a name and email; anything that looks like an email is fine; it's only used for account lookup.

Character creation is almost done (no spell selection phase yet, so everyone gets all the same spells). No interface for the weapon shop yet, so each party starts with some basic equipment (which you have to equip if you want to use). There's a basic "dungeon crawl" view that I'm still working on, and what I'd really like your POV on is the battle interface -- which is similar enough to BT that you'll get the idea, but captures the "improvements" I always wanted.

I hope you'll check it out and let me know what you think!