Dark Havoc

Dark Havoc is a 2D action roguelite where skill is the only progression system. No leveling up health or damage, just getting better at reading and countering what's in front of you. It's the project where I pulled together everything from my earlier prototypes and pushed hard on game feel, juice, and content scale for the first time.

Architecture-wise, every enemy shares one common Enemy component, but each type plugs in its own "brain", a dedicated state machine that defines how it moves, telegraphs, and attacks. That split let me add new enemy variety by writing new brains instead of new enemies from scratch, and it's the same modular-AI approach I'd carry into later, larger projects.

Levels are procedurally generated, using a room-graph approach inspired by Spelunky's world generation, hand-authored room pieces stitched together by rules, so runs stay different without feeling random or unfair.

Combat takes clear cues from Dead Cells: light/heavy combo strings, a tightened parry window, and weightier jumps and animations, all backed by custom VFX and 2D shaders built in Shader Graph to sell hits and impacts. Bosses go multi-stage, each with its own attack patterns and phase transitions, built on top of the same brain-state-machine framework as regular enemies. The whole game was designed and tuned for controller play first.

Working at this scale also meant learning to manage a much larger volume of art and animation than my earlier projects, keeping a consistent pipeline as the enemy and VFX count grew.

Art by Penusbmic.

Play it free in your browser on itch.io.