Dungeon Keeper Reborn

A clean-room reimagining of the 1997 dungeon-management classic: you are an evil keeper, you carve a dungeon out of solid rock, you lure monsters into it, and you feed the heroes who come to stop you to those monsters.

The goal is the original's look and feel, rebuilt with modern rendering — torchlit PBR materials, dynamic lights, real-time shadows, bloom — and made to run on anything with a browser.

Play it

Web (all platforms, nothing to install): play it at https://joko1977-ui.github.io/DungeonKeeperReborn/, or run it locally in two commands. It works on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and iOS — anything with a modern browser. On desktop Chrome/Edge and on Android you can also use Install app to get it as a standalone, offline-capable PWA.

npm install
npm run dev          # http://localhost:5173

For a production build:

npm run build        # outputs to dist/
npm run preview      # serve the built game on :4173

dist/ is a fully static directory — drop it on any web host, or open it from a file server. There is no backend.

Desktop (native window): a Tauri shell wraps the same build into a real application for Windows, macOS and Linux. It is deliberately thin — a native window around the web build — so there is only ever one game to maintain.

npm install
npm run tauri build  # bundles .msi/.exe, .dmg, .deb and .AppImage

Icons under src-tauri/icons/ are generated from a single source with npm run tauri icon <file.png>; they are committed because the Rust build embeds them at compile time.

CI builds all three desktop platforms and the web bundle on every push, and deploys the web build to GitHub Pages from the default branch; see .github/workflows/build.yml.

Pages needs switching on once, by hand: Settings → Pages → Source → GitHub Actions. The workflow token is permitted to publish to an existing Pages site but not to create one, so this cannot be automated from CI; the deploy job checks for it and fails with that instruction if it is missing.

Controls

The original's mouse language is unusual, and it is the interface, so it is reproduced exactly.

Input	Action
Left click / drag	Tag walls for excavation. The first tile decides whether the drag tags or untags.
Left click on your creature	Snatch it into the Hand of Evil. Click again to drop it on any floor you own.
Right click on a creature	Slap it — it works faster, takes a little damage, and resents you.
Right click on a wall	Clear an excavation tag.
Middle drag, Q / E	Rotate the view freely, and tilt with a vertical drag.
Wheel, PgUp/PgDn	Zoom.
WASD / arrows / screen edge	Move the view.
R / F / T / C	Rooms, Spells, Workshop and Creatures tabs. 1–9 picks from the open tab.
Space	Pause. Esc puts down the selected tool.
Top right	Toggle the sound mix and the narrator.

On a tablet or phone

One finger is the Hand of Evil, two fingers are the camera. Tagging a slab of wall is a drag and it is the thing you do most, so it gets the single finger; the camera lives on the two-finger gesture, which had to carry a pinch anyway.

Gesture	Action
Tap	Tag a wall (tap again to untag) · pick up one of your creatures · drop what you are holding
One-finger drag	Paint tags across a slab, exactly as holding the left button does
Press and hold	Slap the creature under your finger
Two-finger drag	Move the view
Pinch / twist	Zoom and rotate

The moment a second finger lands, anything the first one had started is abandoned — a two-finger pan never leaves a trail of tagged walls behind it.

Add it to your home screen for a full-screen, offline-capable app. Rendering quality is chosen from the device and steps down on its own if the frame rate cannot keep up; ?quality=high or ?quality=low overrides that if you want to see what the hardware will really do.

How the game works

Play follows the original's loop:

1. Tag and dig. Your imps excavate anything you have tagged and can reach, working inward through a tagged slab layer by layer.
2. Claim. Dug floor is neutral until an imp converts it. Claimed floor is the only place you can build, and it is what generates mana and lights the corridors.
3. Mine. Gold seams pay into your treasury — but only as much as your treasury has room for, so treasure rooms are a real constraint. Gem seams never run out.
4. Build. A lair and a hatchery are the gate on everything else: creatures will not come through your portal without a bed to sleep in and food to eat.
5. Keep them. Creatures get hungry, tired and angry. Unpaid creatures at payday become furious; furious creatures walk out through your portal.
6. Manufacture. A workshop staffed by trolls or bile demons builds traps and doors. Nothing can be placed that has not been built and paid for first, so a workshop is worth the floor space and losing one hurts.
7. Fight. Heroes arrive in escalating parties from the hero gate, and they come for your Dungeon Heart — through the earth if you have not left them a route. A rival keeper is digging, building and raiding the whole time.
8. Win. Break every rival keeper's heart and kill the Lord of the Land when he comes down. Lose your own heart and the level is over.

Objectives

Every generated realm comes with a goal, because a realm without one is a hole to dig in rather than a level. The briefing names them, they sit in a card in the corner while you play, and the verdict screen says which you met.

The shape is fixed and the numbers are seeded, which is deliberate: goals rolled entirely at random read as a chore list. Every realm asks you to break the rival keeper and kill the Lord of the Land; two bonus goals are drawn from hoarding gold, claiming territory, raising an army of a given level, furnishing every room type, and turning back hero raids.

The Lord of the Land does not arrive on a timer you can watch. He comes once you have turned back a couple of raids and dug a dungeon worth the trip — and, if you have been very careful and done neither, eventually anyway, so a cautious game still gets an ending. You get a warning first. He brings an escort.

Rival keepers run the same loop you do: they order digging, claim what they open, build a treasury, lair, hatchery and training room, and send whatever they can spare at your heart. They are not clever. The pressure is that they never stop.

Rank shows. A creature that levels up does not merely gain a number: at level 4 it picks up scavenged plating and studs down its spine, at 7 heavier pauldrons with rivets, bracers and a jawguard, and at 9 polished steel, a horned circlet and a crest of blades. It grows as it goes, its eyes brighten, and a champion carries a slow ring of light. You can tell a veteran across the room, which is most of why training one is worth the gold.

Seeds replay. The whole simulation runs on one seeded stream, so the same seed plays the same way every time — the map, the creatures the portal offers, the hero parties, all of it.

Breaking a heart takes a sustained assault. Since you can only drop creatures onto floor you own, invading means digging in and then planting a Call to Arms — a standing flag your creatures hold until you cast on it again. That is the whole attacking game: dig, flag, and get there before the defenders rally.

Rooms available: Treasury, Lair, Hatchery, Training Room, Library, Workshop and Bridge. Keeper spells: Create Imp, Heal, Speed, Lightning, Call to Arms and Possess.

Traps and doors

Order a device from the Workshop tab (T), wait for the workshop to finish it, then click the same button again to place it. Traps go on your own bare claimed floor; doors need a doorway — walls on both sides of the tile.

Trap	Does
Alarm	Harmless, but every creature you own drops what it is doing and comes running.
Poison Gas	Leaves a cloud that keeps hurting whatever stands in it.
Lightning	One hard strike on whatever crossed it. Five charges.
Boulder	Heavy damage, single use.
Word of Power	A wide shockwave.

Doors run Wooden, Braced, Iron, Magic — each one tougher than the last. Doors are deliberately not solid to the pathfinder: making them impassable would send intruders looking for another way round and they would never attack one. Instead the route goes through, and an intruder that reaches a door it does not own stops and breaks it down. The panel visibly darkens and leans as its integrity drops, so you can see which door is about to go.

Look

A free orbiting perspective camera, as the original had: push the focus around, spin it, tilt it, drop close to the floor. This was locked to a strict isometric projection for a while and it was the wrong call — you could not lean in to watch a fight or look along a corridor you were digging.

Stylised rather than photoreal: ink outlines from a depth pass, flat blocks of colour, and warm firelight against cool shadow. The geometry here is built from primitives, and an outline makes that read as a choice instead of a limitation.

Everything down here is lit by fire or by magic. There is no cool fill and no daylight: volcanic basalt walls with organic tissue growing through them, black flagstone cracked open over molten rock, gold at full metalness, and rune-lit beacons in cyan and magenta over the landmarks. Embers rise, ash falls, dust hangs in the shafts of light.

Sound

All of it is synthesised in the browser. No audio files ship with the game, for the same reasons no images do.

Ambience is a continuous bed: a low detuned drone through a slowly breathing filter, cave rumble from brown noise, torch crackle, and water drips fed mostly into a reverb built from a synthetic impulse response, so they land as somewhere down the corridor rather than next to your ear.

Score is a slow four-chord progression in a natural minor, played on long overlapping pads that never quite resolve. Underneath it is the Dungeon Heart — a two-thump pulse that quickens as hostile creatures get closer to your heart. It is the cheapest warning system in the game and you feel it before you read anything.

Effects are one-shots built from oscillators and shaped noise, panned and attenuated by where they happened relative to the camera; anything past the camera's reach is dropped entirely. Because a dozen imps generate dig events several times a second each, every sound has a minimum spacing and the mix has a per-frame voice cap — otherwise a working dungeon is just noise. A limiter on the master bus keeps a busy fight from clipping.

About the narrator

The original's voice is a performance by a specific actor. That is not something this project can or should reproduce, and no attempt is made to imitate it.

What is reproduced is the role it played: a dry, faintly contemptuous presence that comments on your dungeon and is never quite on your side. Delivery goes through your platform's own speech synthesiser — pitched well down and slowed, preferring a deep English voice where the system has one. The writing is original.

So he will not sound like the narrator you remember. He is, however, no fonder of you:

"Payday. Your creatures are briefly tolerable." "Heroes. They have come to be reasonable at you. Kill them." "Your heart is broken. Somewhere a knight is being given a medal."

Narration is event-driven: game notifications carry a typed cue, and the narrator maps cues to lines with per-cue cooldowns and several variants each, so a long game does not become one sentence on a loop. Low-priority remarks are dropped rather than queued while something important is being said, and the ambience ducks under the voice.

Everything degrades quietly. No Web Audio, no speech synthesis, no voices installed, or a player who has simply turned it off — the game runs silent and the printed message log carries on doing its job. Audio only starts on a real click, because browsers refuse otherwise.

How it is built

src/
  core/        the simulation — no rendering, no DOM
    constants.ts   terrain, rooms, spells, balance numbers
    tilemap.ts     the grid, as parallel typed arrays
    pathfinding.ts A* plus a "nearest thing matching X" search
    creatures.ts   the roster and the creature record
    ai.ts          needs-driven creature behaviour
    rooms.ts       placement, selling, room lookup index
    devices.ts     trap and door specs, and the manufacture queue
    objectives.ts  level goals, progress, and seeded objective sets
    keeperAi.ts    rival keepers: dig orders, building, raids
    sim.ts         the simulation's one seeded random stream
    game.ts        the tick, the economy, spells, the Hand of Evil
    levelgen.ts    seeded realm generation
  render/      three.js
    textures.ts        every material, generated procedurally at load
    terrain.ts         the whole dungeon in two instanced draw calls
    creatureModels.ts  creature meshes built from primitives (25-40 parts each)
    creatureRenderer.ts instanced drawing and procedural animation
    roomProps.ts       room furniture — heaps, nests, dummies, anvils, the Heart
    deviceRenderer.ts  traps, doors and the gas they leave behind
    creatureRank.ts    armour and horns earned by levelling up
    atmosphere.ts      embers, ash, dust motes and god rays
    landmarks.ts       room labels and beacons over the places that matter
    effects.ts         torches, dynamic lights, particles
    scene.ts           renderer, lighting rig, post-processing
  audio/       the soundscape, all synthesised
    synth.ts       noise buffers, cave impulse response, envelopes
    audio.ts       buses, ambience, score, positional one-shots
    narrator.ts    speech synthesis, line pools, cue cooldowns
    director.ts    game events -> sound, with rate limiting
  input/       camera control and the Hand of Evil
  ui/          the keeper's panel, minimap, icons, overlays, objectives card

A few decisions worth knowing about:

• The simulation is separate from everything else. src/core has no reference to three.js or the DOM. It runs headlessly, which is how the game loop was tested before there was anything to look at.
• Fixed 20 Hz simulation, free-running render. Behaviour is identical at 30 or 144 fps; only smoothness changes.
• No art assets ship with the game. Every texture is generated from noise functions at load time and every creature is built from primitives. That keeps the download small, keeps materials sharp at any resolution, and means nothing in the repository is anyone else's artwork.
• Two draw calls for the entire map. Floors and walls are instanced meshes; which material an instance wears is a per-instance atlas index read by a small patch to three's standard shader. Map size costs almost nothing.
• Torches are cheap. Every wall bordering claimed floor gets a glowing point, but only the seven nearest the camera are promoted to real dynamic lights.
• Warm and cool are kept apart. Fill light is cool and dim so unlit stone reads as blue shadow; everything warm comes from fire. Flat neutral fill was what made early builds look like brown mud. A final grade after tone mapping lifts the blacks toward blue, restores the saturation ACES takes away, and vignettes the frame.
• Nothing repeats visibly. Wall blocks are chamfered and get per-tile height, yaw and brightness variation; floor quads get a random quarter turn, because identical UVs on every tile aligned the mortar into one hard lattice across the whole map.
• Nothing is an asset. Textures, creature meshes, room furniture, icons, cursors and every sound are generated at runtime. The whole game is code.
• Creatures are sculpted, not assembled from spheres. Each species is 25-40 primitives built from real anatomy — a jaw hung off the skull, a browline, shoulders wider than the head, tapering segmented tails, hands with individual claws, and the gear each one would carry (the warlock's staff and chained book, the dwarf's pick, the knight's plumed helm, shield and sword). Detail is affordable because geometry is uploaded once per species and then instanced: extra parts cost vertex transform, never draw calls.
• Rooms are furnished, not just retextured. Each room tile carries a piece of instanced furniture — gold heaps that visibly grow as the vault fills, straw nests, egg clutches, training dummies, bookshelves — with per-tile rotation and scale from a hash of the tile index so a big room isn't a grid of clones. The Dungeon Heart and the portal are single centrepieces that light their own chambers.

Quality settings are chosen from the device: phones and low-core machines drop bloom, shadows and pixel ratio automatically.

Development

npm run dev         # dev server with hot reload
npm run typecheck   # tsc --noEmit, strict
npm run build       # typecheck + production bundle

Append ?seed=1234 to the URL to generate a different realm. window.dk exposes the running game, camera and render rig for poking at from the console.

Legal

This is an original, independent work. It contains no code, art, audio, level data or other assets from Dungeon Keeper; everything here was written from scratch, and all visuals are generated procedurally at runtime.

Dungeon Keeper is a trademark of Electronic Arts Inc. This project is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Electronic Arts or Bullfrog Productions. It is a tribute, built because the original is thirty years old and still has no real successor.

The source in this repository is available under the MIT License.