The first public build of Dungeon Delvers. A single class, a top-down dungeon, enemy waves, gold drops and a death screen — the bare loop that everything else was built on top of.
v1.0 was less a finished game and more a playable answer to a single question: "does pushing one room deeper feel good enough on its own?" The answer was yes — but only barely, and only with very specific enemy pacing. The patches that followed all extended this core loop instead of replacing it.
The leaderboard, class system, enchantment table, 3D mode and cooperative multiplayer were not part of v1.0. Players who got past floor 8 noticed how repetitive enemy mixes felt, which is what motivated the work in v1.1 and v1.2.
Shipping a small, honest first version forced every later decision to justify itself against the original loop. New systems had to make a one-room push more interesting, not just busier. That filter is the reason classes were added before lore, why enchantments require gold instead of unlocking automatically, and why every fifth floor still ends on a boss check instead of a story beat.
