Dungeon Crawler Carl Unstoppable

About Dungeon Crawler Carl Unstoppable

Dungeon Crawler Carl: Unstoppable is designed by John D. Clair and published by Renegade Games. Re-implementing the popular Unstoppable game from 2025, this new version integrates the beloved characters from the Dungeon Crawler Carl LitRPG book series. In this solo or co-operative deck-building game, you'll need to use card crafting and deck-building to defeat threats, earning more and more attack cards for each threat you defeat.

Cards are placed in plastic sleeves, where monsters appear on one side of the card, flipping over into a new playable card for you after you defeat it. You can also buy upgrades, which show through the punchouts in the cards and add new powers to one side while making the monsters more dangerous on the other.

Project Overview:

We received drafts of three of the four floors and a wide sampling of initial cards from the designer. Our task: evaluating and updating the product to meet the needs of a standalone expansion, including content creation for characters, cards, and floors.

Initially, we had planned for a single expansion, but due to the amount of space available to explore, we asked for approval to split that expansion into two: Iron Tangle, which covers the 3rd book of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, and Crawler Chaos, which expands the number of options for your character. The additional expansion generated more than $200000 in revenue for our client during their crowdfunding campaign.

Services Provided:

Case Study: Improving Cooperative Play

The original Unstoppable game is part of Renegade Game Studios' "Solo Hero Series", and while it had a cooperative mode available, the primary way people played the title was solo. Dungeon Crawler Carl is a series that focuses very heavily on the partnership between Carl and Princess Donut, so expanding Unstoppable's cooperative depth was an important part of capturing the feel of the books.

We experimented with allowing players to combine resources to allow expensive card purchases to be split between the heroes, and while it was fun to cheat the curve and get access to high-powered cards, we ran into the problem of both players funnelling their resources into one player. It was often the optimal play, but rarely the fun play, as one person would sit on the sidelines and bankroll their teammate getting to play with all of the exciting toys.

We found a middle ground where we adjusted some cards to be more interesting when sharing with your partner, but you couldn't just pour all your money into one player. We added multiplayer functionality to around 40% of the cardpool to let players re-evaluate the strength of cards in this new 2-player format.

The final challenge came with adding a new 2-player draft rule. We wanted to allow the players to look at a larger pool of cards when drafting and let each player take the cards more useful to their individual strategies. There were some technical issues when the players were drafting from different decks, but we worked on a special hybrid-draft rule that ended up being a lot of fun to discuss strategies with your partner and also keep you aware of what they were up to. Combined with our other changes, this really help avoid the feeling that you were just playing two solo games side-by-side.

We're very proud of all of our development work on Dungeon Crawler Carl Unstoppable, from cooperative play to thematics and content design. It's truly a love letter to the books, and a great new entry in John D. Clair's Unstoppable series.

Brieger Creative Team

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