- Directory Dungeon is part of the Out Of The Box Games Showcase! - 21 September 2026
Hello!Today is the start of the Out Of The Box Games Showcase, a whole showcase and Steam Event devoted to games that are somewhat different to what you might have encountered before. The showcase and Steam Event will run from September 21st to September 28th, and as it happens, Directory Dungeon is taking part in it.Directory DungeonIf you haven't played Directory Dungeon yet, now is a great time. It's currently 40% off (along with Deep Space Exploitation...) so go pick it up!Steam EventThe showcase will feature a Steam Event and sale, which I will link to right here. If Directory Dungeon interests you at all then I'm sure you'll be able to find other bizarre experiences to your liking.YouTube Premiere and Twitch LivestreamThe showcase itself will be available on YouTube and livestreamed on Twitch. The whole event is hosted and organised by Coven, so do check out all the things they ge…
- New Game Announcement: Terminal Reign - 2 September 2026
Hello!Today I'm announcing my next game, Terminal Reign. I've been working on this for a few months now, and I'm really excited to start showing it off and posting about it more, especially to players of my other games.So please take a look and maybe wishlist. If you like Directory Dungeon, you might like this similarly interface-driven game.Terminal ReignA vast empire struggles to maintain its millennia old grip on the stars. Headed by an emperor half-deranged by centuries of rule, its power is challenged by the organising kingdoms that border its domain. To manage these threats, the empire presses anyone it can into servitude to operate its decaying military of remote weapons.Operate a remote armoured vehicle for the glory and whims of a dying empire. Undertake tactical missions, configure your command desk with an array of devices, and remain in favour to survive.
- v1.22 Update - Scripting Help and Permanent Temp Fix - 8 August 2026
I recently had a player pop into the discord server and tell me they were making a bot in PowerShell to play the game. This was super cool, and they also had suggestions for how the game could be made more accessible for scripting. The idea was to write the stats of items and NPCs as json to their files, so that they could be more easily inspected (instead of relying on parsing the game's output stream). I put this behind a config flag ("ShouldWriteItemStatsToFiles") and set it to "false" by default so that new players don't get the impression that they can edit these stats in real time, which was one of my original plans for the game but something I decided against. So if you were tempted to make some kind of bot to play the game, now is the time to give it a try. And please do let me know of any ideas you might have to make scripting better or more interesting. :) I also managed to ge…
- v1.20 Update - Hiding In Boxes Fix - 12 May 2026
A fix update in response to a funny little player reported crash. When putting NPCs into boxes (or any container), if you did it again after they climbed out then the game would crash. This was happening because after the NPC climbed out the game wasn't restarting the encounter, so when you put the NPC back in the box the game attempted to resolve an encounter that wasn't currently taking place. The fix was to perform the encounter start check after the NPC climbed out of the container (this also lead to more logical ordering of the console logs narrating events). While testing this I also saw that when the player gets inside a container they escape the current encounter, but then it starts right back up again while they're in the container and the NPCs are in the room. I found this pretty funny, and imagined it'd be really cool if the containers themselves had health and while you were…
- v1.19 Update - Shortcuts Fix - 8 May 2026
Small update with regards to a crash reported by a player, massively helped along by the logs they provided (thanks again!). The player was getting intermittent crashes which, from the logs, were caused by the game accessing one of the shortcut files while it was being used by another process. This was on a shortcut that the game had created less than a second ago, so most likely the approach I'm using to handle the shortcuts (Shell32) wasn't releasing resources in time? I'm not sure. This kind of stuff is always tricky, so I've gone for adding a retry to these operations (maximum 3 attempts, 500ms between each attempt), and also adding an alternative approach to handling shortcuts that uses a different Windows API. The alternative approach can be selected from the Configuration.json file with the "ShouldUseAlternativeShortcutManipulator" property. v1.19 Changelog - Added retry to short…
- v1.18 Update - A Well Hidden Bug - 26 April 2026
Quick update before InterfaceX26 starts tomorrow.A bug report from a player highlighted something which has been in the game since the start, but only very very rarely hits. The bug is that if you move an NPC while you're in combat, the game can crash. This is something I've tested many times before and found working fine, but when I tried to reproduce it myself after reading the bug report, it hit the first time! And then proceeded to not hit again all the other times I tried to reproduce it afterwards. Turns out it's a very specific timing issue that hits if you move an NPC while in combat less than 250 milliseconds before the next round is processed. 250 milliseconds is the default interval the game waits after seeing the most recent file system change before processing it, to make sure it handles batches of changes properly. Because the game would be waiting for this interval before…
- Directory Dungeon is part of the InterfaceX26 Showcase! - 14 April 2026
Hello!Today I get to announce that Directory Dungeon will be part of the InterfaceX26 Showcase! But what is InterfaceX? InterfaceXInterfaceX is a developer-led initiative and Steam sale celebrating “Fake OS” games - titles that take place within digital interfaces such as desktops, operating systems, chat logs, and devices. A grassroots initiative by more than 150 developers and publishers, InterfaceX aims to spotlight the genre, connect its community, and establish “Fake OS” as an official Steam tag. The event includes a week-long Steam sale, a live showcase, and a coordinated community effort to make these games easier to discover. Check out the games now at interfacex.net, and get ready for the Steam sale running from April 27th to May 4th! The ShowcaseAlongside the sale, the event includes a live showcase on May 2, featuring 32 new and updated games. The showcase will be hosted by G…
- v1.17 Update - QoL and Fix - 14 April 2026
Small quality of life and fix update for v1.17. Yesterday a player popped in the Discord with a crash report (they provided full logs so I got to reap the benefit of the recent additional logging I added) caused by a nice corner-case. They had teleported between two rooms which were adjacent but had still-hidden doors. The game crashed when it attempted to remove the "(back)" tag from one of the doors which didn't exist, which is annoying because the code for adding the tag makes sure to check for the door's existence. So an easy fix, and while I was in the are I decided to add a new "(visited)" tag to doors that are targeting explored rooms. Check it out: v1.17 Changelog - Added "(visited)" tag to doors targeting explored rooms. - Fixed game attempting to remove "(back)" tag from door links that haven't been created yet.
- v1.16 Update - Fixes - 1 April 2026
Very small v1.16 update after a user reported an interesting bug. When verifying changes to shortcuts the game was comparing file paths with case sensitivity, which it shouldn't do since Windows' file system is case-insensitive. On this particular user's machine a path was sometimes being read with some changes to character casing, but not the overall file path, so the game thought the path was changing when in fact it wasn't. Hopefully all fixed now :) v1.16 Changelog - Added extra logging around general file system changes seen and processed - Updated many of the file name and path comparisons to check for case sensitivity
- v1.14 Update - Robustness - 12 March 2026
This update is to cover some gaps in the game's robustness. I watched a stream of the game earlier today and saw the streamer really enjoying the game and discovering how it all worked, but then they died and kept getting an exception when entering the 'restart' command. The problem was that when the game restarts it deletes the "Game" folder which contains the game world and then re-creates it, but the streamer had left a file open (the Mysterious Letter) which was preventing this, and so they were getting a big nasty unhandled exception and ultimately gave up and moved on to something else. Part of this update is to handle that properly and just create a new folder if it's not possible to use the default one. Also some of the guys in the chat seemed to think it was a virus (I'm not too sure, it was Indonesian), so I'm now trying to make sure no big scary exception messages get printed…
- v1.13 Update - Typos and Tweaks - 11 March 2026
Small update for a few days after release. Thankfully so far there haven't been any bugs to fix (except one potential one that's still being investigated) and mostly it's been typos and small tweaks. Turns out that when I updated Visual Studio recently it turned off my spell check... at least that's my excuse. v1.13 Changelog - Fixes for typos in tutorial and room name text. - Updated demo and full version end game screens to include reminders to check out other games and also the discord. - The golden cup needed for the fountain puzzle is now dropped by the Vampire Lord, this is to make an extra step of logic in the puzzle, and also to make confronting the Vampire Lord necessary.
- Directory Dungeon is OUT NOW! - 9 March 2026
Hello!The full version of Directory Dungeon is now released and available to purchase and play on Itch and Steam for the incredible price of $1.30! (That's $1.99 discounted by 35% for 2 weeks!)If you'd prefer, the demo is still available and offers a sizeable chunk of the game.I was originally meant to release earlier this month on the 4th, but I had some travel plans change and then I wanted to add some more features, so I ended up pushing back until today.Anyway, go play the game and enjoy! :)Version 1.11 Changelog:- Added Tutorial in the file explorer so there isn't just the text explanation in the console- Fix for crash when renaming or moving "Unexplored Room" marker files- Added fountain puzzle room- Fix for door colours- Game will now update file paths in the clipboard if it's renaming a directory which would effect them (this can be disabled in the config file)- Additional unit…
- Demo v1.8 Update - 17 February 2026
Hello! Version 1.8 of the demo has been released with a bunch of quality of life changes (some pretty tricky to implement, I'll have you know).The demo will be taking part in Next Fest in less than a week's time, and then soon after that the full version will be released! Exciting! v1.8 Changelog:There was an issue revolving around the fact the player's health is represented in their folder name, so if something happened to change the player's health (like eating a cabbage) while the player folder was open in the file explorer, the file explorer would lose track of the folder because it would be renamed. This is now fixed (or worked around) by having the game detect when the player folder is open in an explorer window and then delaying the rename until it isn't. I tried a couple of ways to implement this and ended up on something that was fairly robust.Equipment can now be examined by d…
- Demo Released! - 5 February 2026
Hello!The demo is now released! You can download it right now here on Steam! The demo is probably about 30 minutes long and lets you experience the whole "file explorer" thing, along with being a little replayable due to randomness. The full release is coming in March, just after February's Next Fest ends, so look out for that. :)
