Cave Commander
Dig a dungeon. Fill it with things. Wait for someone to walk in.
A dungeon management game on a phone. Condemn the rock, raise the chambers, feed the denizens, and let the heroes walk into what you built.
In the workshop, not submitted anywhere yet. It is not on any store yet. Playtesters get it first.
Get the build- Genre
- Management / Strategy
- Built with
- Godot 4.7
- Orientation
- Landscape
- Price
- Free
What it is
About Cave Commander
You are not the hero. You own the hole the hero is about to walk into. Condemn slabs of rock to be dug, raise chambers on the space you clear, and every room you build changes who turns up to live in it. A hatchery feeds, a lair houses, a torture chamber recruits, and a treasury is the reason anyone comes down at all.
It runs on a fixed ten-hertz pulse that everything simulates against, and it stops dead the moment the app loses focus - a dungeon that quietly earns while your phone is in your pocket is a different, worse game.
Every system, file, class and verb in it is named from the dungeon’s own vocabulary rather than from software. There is a lexicon, and it is the first thing anyone working on it reads.
Design notes
Why it works the way it does
The rooms decide the roster
You do not recruit. You build, and what you built determines who moves in and whether they stay.
A dungeon that stops
The simulation freezes when the app loses focus. No offline earnings, no guilt about closing it.
Real management on a phone
Digging, pathing, payday, morale and an actual economy, arranged for a touchscreen instead of squeezed onto one.
Its own language
Strata, Warren, Coffers, the Hand of Evil. Nothing in it is called what it would be called in anyone else’s codebase.
Screens
From the running build
Every shot is captured from the real game. Nothing here is a mock-up.
Questions
Things people ask
Is this the game I am thinking of?
It is a love letter to it, rebuilt for a phone and for touch, with its own systems underneath.
Does it earn while closed?
No, deliberately. The dungeon is stilled when you are not looking at it.
How finished is it?
Systems-complete and in the workshop. The screenshots here are from the running build.
Paperwork
Cave Commander policies
Every game has its own privacy policy and its own terms, written from what that specific build actually does rather than a single studio-wide document that has to cover everything.
- Data collected: Nothing. The game does not talk to a server at all.
- Account required: No — there is no login and no profile
- Ads: None
- In-app purchases: None
Elsewhere
