EchoQuest v0.23.0: Traps, Keys & Dungeon Lore
This update is all about making dungeons feel dangerous and alive. Until now, dungeon floors were mostly about fighting enemies and opening chests. Starting today, the dungeon itself is trying to kill you.
Traps with real depth
We didn’t want traps to be simple “step here, take damage” tiles. Every trap in EchoQuest runs through a full mitigation chain inspired by tabletop RPGs. First, a dodge check — your evasion stat plus a class bonus determines whether you leap out of the way entirely. Rogues and Rangers excel here. If you don’t dodge, your armor reduces the incoming damage using the same physical/magical defense formula as regular combat. Then a saving throw gives you one last chance to halve whatever damage remains. Clerics and Warriors have the strongest saves. Finally, some traps apply status effects: poison inflicts damage over time, ice slows you down, and lightning can briefly stun you.
There are seven trap variants — spikes, fire, poison, darts, ice, lightning, and pressure plates — and the mix gets nastier as you descend. Floor 1 might have basic spikes. By floor 4 you’re dodging hidden lightning runes. Under the hood, damage type determines which defense stat applies: spikes and darts check physical defense, while fire, ice, and lightning check magical defense. This means your gear choices matter in dungeons now more than ever.
Disarming
See a trap? Click it to try disarming it. Your class matters: a Rogue starts with a 50% disarm bonus, while a Warrior sits at 10%. Level scaling pushes those odds higher over time. Succeed and you earn XP proportional to the trap’s difficulty. Fail and the trap triggers on you — so it’s a calculated risk. We went with class-based bonuses rather than a separate “trap disarm” skill because it keeps the system grounded in your existing character identity without adding new attributes to manage.
Hidden traps & trapped doors
Some traps are invisible until your character gets close enough to detect them. Detection uses the same class bonuses as disarming — Rogues spot them first. On deeper floors, 20% of traps start hidden, making a Rogue in the party genuinely valuable beyond DPS.
Doors can also be trapped now. Click a trapped door and you’ll see a choice: try to disarm the trap first, or just force it open and take the hit. Key-locked doors add another layer — find the key in a nearby chest, and it’s consumed when you unlock the door. Lock icons on doors tell you at a glance whether you need a key or a lever.
Flavor text zones
As you explore, you’ll start seeing styled text panels appear with bits of lore, hints, and atmosphere. These are flavor text zones — hand-placed areas on the map that describe what you’re walking through. An ancient library might mention the crumbling bookshelves. A dungeon entrance might warn about what lurks below. Each entry has its own color, icon, and display duration, and the text is stored in a reusable library so the same descriptions can appear across multiple maps. This is a building block for richer storytelling as the world grows.
Desktop app groundwork
Behind the scenes, this release also includes the foundation for a standalone desktop app via Electron, with Steam integration for achievements, cloud saves, and rich presence. Single-player mode got local save protection and offline adaptations. This work isn’t player-visible yet, but it’s the infrastructure for our eventual Steam launch.
Performance
Off-screen characters now pause their animations, and mobile devices get reduced particle counts for weather and combat effects. Small changes, but they add up — especially on longer play sessions or lower-end hardware.
Try the EchoQuest Demo — free in your browser. Full game coming to Steam. Full patch notes are on the EchoQuest devlog.