Dawngeon.

Status — Released
Type — Personal
Duration — ~2 years
Stack — Unity (C#), GitHub, Xcode
Role — Solo developer; programmer, artist, designer, narrative, sound

Trailer.

Dawngeon was a high-school passion project. I spearheaded end-to-end development in Unity and C#, prioritizing mobile-first UX and tactile feedback. My first time shipping to the App Store — first time learning Xcode, first time fielding real user feedback.

Achievements.

— 21M App Store impressions.
— 140,000+ downloads worldwide.
— 4.6 / 5.0 rating.
— Charted #130 in the App Store Adventure category.

What's inside.

Touch-first controls — a responsive virtual joystick and action buttons tuned for the moment-to-moment feel of mobile combat.

Weapons and projectile families that the skill tree extends. Each attribute is modulated by player stats and skills, so two builds with the same weapon can play very differently.

Pathfinding, decision-making, and combat tactics layered on a state machine — patrol, chase, attack. Tuning was the long pole; the framework was the easy part.

A dungeon generator that composes modular rooms, enemy distributions, and item placements differently every run. Replayability is the genre's promise; ProcGen is how you keep it.

Levels, encounters, item placements, and environmental hazards balanced so each run feels demanding but fair. The game has to be hard for the right reasons, not the cheap ones.

A save system that survives the realities of mobile — phone calls, battery deaths, the App Switcher. You can stop mid-run and pick up exactly where you left off.

A custom storytelling layer to deliver dialog, lore, and beats in the rhythm of the run.

An inventory layer for managing items, equipment, and resources — paired with crafting that turns gathered materials into upgraded gear. The economy is part of the loop.

Players combine ingredients found in the dungeon into meals that hand out buffs. A dedicated UI for selecting recipes and managing pantry, designed so it feels like a tiny kitchen, not a menu screen.

Zero prior experience, zero budget. Shipped to the App Store, crossed 140K downloads, and ran the game's social presence and community outreach myself — trailers, screenshots, the works. The lesson, mostly, was that distribution is part of design.