Hello everyone! Today is the 44th day of CaveVox development. In this devlog, we will talk about the dungeon enemies. The early stages of development were shared outside of Steam, but now we’ll regularly share our progress here as well!
Monsters are a natural threat for any roguelike explorer. But CaveVox is not endless extermination of hordes, like in classic Action-RPGs. Here the player freely wanders through the dungeon floors, where not every room is filled with danger. Sometimes these can be barracks, dining halls, lobbies, or other rooms that change from floor to floor and create the feeling of a truly living world.
The types of monsters partially overlap with Kingso, but as a prequel, CaveVox also introduces unique enemies. The dungeon keeps its own secrets: it spawns its inhabitants, replenishes their losses, and maintains balance, allowing the depths to remain dangerous.
Take, for example, the water slime — the simplest and yet insidious enemy. It is a blue jelly-like substance whose strength and mobility directly depend on its mass. The slime moves by jumping, sticking and slapping against the floor and walls. A single enemy like this is easily defeated, but several together are capable of overcoming even a well-prepared party of adventurers.
The placement of enemies fully depends on the dungeon generation. Earlier, the creation of rooms was already mentioned, but recently their structure was updated. Now the rooms have different shapes, connected into a dependency network, which makes every floor unique and unpredictable. The deeper you go, the more diverse and stronger the enemies become.
The difficulty of enemies also differs. It is planned that enemies will use vision, hearing, and object awareness based on a principle similar to occlusion culling for sound: walls, room geometry, and the placement of objects will affect what they can see, what they can hear, and which signals from objects (for example, noise from equipment, falling items, or active devices) can reveal the presence of the player or events. This system will allow them to naturally react to the environment, track targets by sound, account for interactive objects, and even coordinate group actions.
Currently, audio occlusion is already implemented and was described in a previous devlog: environmental and object sounds are correctly dampened and distorted by obstacles, making the dungeons feel truly atmospheric.
Thank you for following the development of CaveVox — every new day makes the dungeon deeper and more alive.