Alderen

Alderen is a descent. You take a torch down into generated mines and caves, you fight what lives there, you take what it was guarding, and you go deeper — until something takes you apart and you start again somewhere entirely new.

The floors are not rooms we drew. Every level is grown from a seed: mines, caverns, corridors, doors, panels that are not where you'd expect a door to be. And the whole place is made of one-metre blocks, all of them yours to break. A wall between you and the stairs is a suggestion. So is the floor, which is worth remembering.

What you carry matters — armour on seven slots, an action bar you'll learn by muscle, a light that only reaches so far. The map fills in as a shape you cut out of the dark, and the shape of what you've explored is the only thing that tells one floor apart from another.

What makes it interesting

• A fully destructible voxel world — walls, floors and ceilings are all diggable, and everything downstream (collision, pathing, line of sight) updates with them
• Every floor grown from a seed, so a run is a place nobody has stood in before
• A fog-of-war map that draws only what you've walked, with the unexplored dark left as dark
• Torch-first art direction: sturdy carved shapes, restrained colour, creatures built to be read at the edge of your light
• A run ends the honest way — you die, and the next one starts somewhere else

Where it is

Alderen has a complete single-player loop running today: start a run, descend generated floors, fight, loot, map the dark and die. It is in development and not yet packaged for release. Single-player at present.