SmelJey’s Into the Depths transforms the underground exploration theme from Ludum Dare 57 game jam into a full roguelike city builder launching Q1 2026. Players lead expeditions into perilous underground caverns called the Depths, establishing mining settlements while managing resources through card-based turn mechanics. The game combines hex-based territory control with procedurally generated dungeons across four layers, challenging you to balance survival needs against the riches hidden in darkness.
- From Game Jam To Full Release
- How The Card-Based City Building Works
- Procedural Dungeons With Persistent Progression
- Why Hex-Based Works For This
- The Underground City Builder Niche
- Turn-Based Strategy Over Real-Time Chaos
- Who Is SmelJey
- Demo Available Now On Steam
- The Roguelike City Builder Mashup
- FAQs
- Conclusion
From Game Jam To Full Release
Into the Depths originated during Ludum Dare 57 in October 2024, a 72-hour game jam where developers create games around specific themes. The 57th edition challenged participants with the theme “Depths,” inspiring SmelJey to create a prototype about colonizing underground caverns through turn-based city building. The jam version featured core mechanics including hex-based placement, card selection systems, and resource management around a castle foundation.
The prototype resonated strongly enough to justify full development. SmelJey expanded the concept significantly beyond the jam version, adding procedural generation across multiple layers, more building types, enhanced resource chains, and deeper strategic complexity. A demo is currently available on both Steam and itch.io, allowing players to experience the expanded vision while development continues toward the March 31, 2026 full release date.
Game jams frequently spawn commercial indie games when prototypes reveal compelling mechanics worth expanding. Celeste, Superhot, Baba Is You, and countless others began as jam projects before evolving into beloved full releases. Into the Depths follows this path, using the jam prototype to validate core concepts before committing resources to complete development.
How The Card-Based City Building Works
Every turn, players receive three random cards from their deck representing different structures, actions, or units. Hovering over cards reveals what each does, what resources it costs, and what benefits it provides. You place these tiles strategically around your central castle, carefully considering adjacency bonuses, resource generation, and territorial expansion. Once placed, you can’t take structures back, making every decision permanent until you demolish walls or obstacles to reclaim space.
Resource management creates constant tension. Settlers consume food every turn, and when food runs out, the game ends. This creates pressure to establish sustainable food production through wells and fields while simultaneously gathering gold for progression, conducting research for technological advancement, and building defenses against underground dangers. Balancing these competing needs through random card draws requires adaptive planning rather than predetermined build orders.
Watchtowers expand your buildable territory, allowing you to claim more hexagonal spaces in the cramped underground environment. You start with limited area around your castle, forcing tough decisions about which structures matter most. As you build watchtowers and demolish existing dungeon walls, your settlement spreads outward, eventually creating sprawling underground colonies that extract maximum value from the Depths.
Procedural Dungeons With Persistent Progression
Into the Depths features procedurally generated dungeons across four distinct layers, each presumably increasing in difficulty and resource potential. The roguelike structure means death is permanent, sending you back to the beginning with a fresh run. However, the game likely includes some form of meta-progression common to roguelikes, allowing you to unlock new card types, starting bonuses, or strategic options between runs.
Each level requires gathering sufficient gold to progress deeper, creating clear milestone goals beyond simple survival. This dual objective system forces players to balance conservative survival strategies against aggressive resource extraction. Playing too safely might keep you alive but prevent progression. Pushing too hard for gold risks depleting food reserves and ending your run prematurely. Finding the optimal balance becomes the core strategic challenge.
The underground setting provides thematic justification for roguelike structure. You’re not conquering the Depths permanently but rather sending repeated expeditions that learn from previous failures. Each run represents another attempt to delve deeper, gather more wealth, and uncover what lies in the darkest caverns. The dangerous unknown becomes gameplay motivation rather than just aesthetic window dressing.
Why Hex-Based Works For This
Hexagonal grids offer distinct advantages over square grids for strategy games. Every adjacent hex is equidistant from the center, eliminating diagonal movement awkwardness that square grids create. For city builders, hexagons allow organic growth patterns that feel more natural than rigid right-angled squares. Players can expand in any direction equally, creating settlements that adapt to terrain rather than forcing geometric shapes onto organic spaces.
The hex system also creates interesting adjacency bonus possibilities. In square grids, corners touch diagonally, creating ambiguity about what counts as adjacent. Hexagons eliminate this confusion – adjacent means sharing an edge, period. This clarity makes adjacency bonuses more intuitive to plan and visualize. If wells boost nearby fields and fields boost nearby wells, you can immediately see the optimal hex placement without counting diagonal relationships.
For underground dungeon environments specifically, hexagons convey natural cave formations better than squares. Caves don’t form right angles. Hexagonal layouts suggest organic geological processes, winding passages, and irregular chambers that squares struggle to represent without looking artificial. The visual aesthetic reinforces the setting while providing mechanical advantages.
The Underground City Builder Niche
Underground city builders occupy a fascinating niche combining claustrophobia with expansion fantasies. Games like Dwarf Fortress pioneered the concept of carving civilizations from solid rock, creating fortress-cities that grow downward rather than outward. The appeal lies partly in the defensive advantages underground locations provide – enemies must navigate narrow tunnels where your defenses concentrate, unlike surface cities vulnerable from all directions.
Into the Depths joins recent underground builders like Dome Keeper and Deep Rock Galactic (which includes base-building elements) in exploring subterranean settings. The roguelike structure distinguishes it from persistent fortress builders, creating shorter sessions focused on optimization and risk management rather than long-term empire building. This makes Into the Depths more accessible for players who love city building concepts but lack time for 50-hour Dwarf Fortress campaigns.
The underground setting also provides natural difficulty progression. As you descend through layers, environments become more dangerous and resource-rich. This creates the roguelike loop of high-risk-high-reward decisions where deeper delving promises greater rewards at increased peril. Surface city builders struggle to create similar natural difficulty curves without artificial mechanics.
Turn-Based Strategy Over Real-Time Chaos
The turn-based structure gives Into the Depths a contemplative pace absent from real-time city builders like They Are Billions or Frostpunk. You can analyze every decision carefully, considering resource implications and adjacency bonuses without frantic clicking or crisis management. This appeals to players who enjoy strategic puzzles more than reactive multitasking.
Turn-based design also makes the card selection system work elegantly. Drawing three random cards each turn creates decision trees where you must adapt plans based on available options. In real-time, this randomness would feel punishing as you frantically wait for the right card while your settlement burns. Turn-based pacing makes randomness feel like a strategic constraint rather than unfair obstacle, since you have time to consider alternatives when optimal cards don’t appear.
The format also suits the roguelike structure perfectly. Runs can be completed in digestible 30-minute sessions according to itch.io estimates, making death less frustrating than in real-time games where you might lose hours to a single mistake. Quick runs encourage experimentation with different strategies rather than conservative optimization of a single approach.
Who Is SmelJey
SmelJey appears to be a solo developer or very small team based on available information, with Into the Depths representing their debut commercial release on Steam. The ability to create a functional city builder with roguelike systems, procedural generation, and polished presentation suggests significant technical skill, though whether this comes from previous professional experience or pure indie passion remains unclear from public profiles.
Developing both the game systems and building out from the Ludum Dare prototype into a full commercial release demonstrates commitment beyond typical jam projects. Most jam games remain interesting prototypes that developers never expand. Pushing Into the Depths toward commercial viability requires months of additional work on content, balance, UI polish, and systems that weren’t necessary for the 72-hour jam.
The March 2026 release target suggests development has been progressing steadily since the October 2024 jam, giving roughly 17 months from prototype to launch. This timeline seems reasonable for a solo or small team developing a mechanically complex strategy game, especially one that requires balancing procedural generation, card systems, and economic simulations.
Demo Available Now On Steam
A playable demo is currently available on Steam, allowing curious players to try Into the Depths before committing to purchase when the full game launches. Demos are increasingly important for indie games as they allow word-of-mouth marketing from players who can confidently recommend experiences they’ve actually tested rather than judging from trailers alone.
The itch.io version offers an alternative way to experience the game, potentially representing the closer-to-jam prototype version while Steam hosts the more polished commercial demo. Both versions let players test whether the hex-based card mechanics and turn-based pacing appeal to them personally before the full release with its complete four-layer dungeon and expanded content.
For strategy and city building fans, demos provide essential information about interface usability, control schemes, and whether the mechanical complexity feels engaging or overwhelming. Into the Depths’ systems sound compelling in description, but actually placing cards, managing resources, and navigating the underground reveals whether the gameplay loop maintains interest across multiple runs.
The Roguelike City Builder Mashup
Combining roguelike structure with city building creates interesting tensions between genres. City builders traditionally reward long-term planning, patient resource accumulation, and gradual expansion over hours or days. Roguelikes emphasize short sessions, permanent death, and starting fresh with knowledge from failed runs. Merging these seemingly contradictory philosophies requires careful design.
Into the Depths appears to solve this by making individual runs 30-minute affairs focused on descending through four layers rather than building sprawling eternal cities. Each run becomes a contained puzzle about optimizing resource extraction and progression before inevitable death or successful completion. The city building elements provide the mechanical complexity, while roguelike structure prevents analysis paralysis by forcing decisions under resource pressure.
Other games have attempted similar fusions with varying success. Rogue Heroes combined roguelike dungeons with town-building meta-progression. Void Bastards merged immersive sim mechanics with roguelike runs. Against the Storm successfully created a roguelite city builder focused on completing objectives in hostile environments before moving to new maps. Into the Depths joins this experimental subgenre attempting to satisfy both strategy optimization enthusiasts and roguelike permadeath masochists.
FAQs
When does Into the Depths release?
The full version of Into the Depths is scheduled to release on March 31, 2026 for PC via Steam. A playable demo is currently available on both Steam and itch.io, allowing players to experience the game before launch. The extended development timeline from the October 2024 Ludum Dare 57 jam prototype to March 2026 launch gives the developer time to expand content and polish systems.
What was Ludum Dare 57’s theme?
Ludum Dare 57 used “Depths” as its theme, inspiring SmelJey to create a game about colonizing underground caverns. The theme fit perfectly for a city builder set in dangerous caves where you delve deeper with each successful progression, extracting riches while managing survival in increasingly perilous environments. The jam version served as prototype for the commercial release.
Is Into the Depths single-player or multiplayer?
Into the Depths appears to be purely single-player based on available information. The turn-based roguelike structure and card-based mechanics lend themselves to solo strategic decision-making rather than competitive or cooperative multiplayer. No multiplayer modes have been announced for the full release.
How long does a typical run last?
According to the itch.io page, average sessions last about half an hour. The four-layer structure and roguelike permadeath create relatively short runs compared to traditional city builders that can span dozens of hours. This makes Into the Depths more accessible for players who want strategic depth without massive time commitments per session.
What platforms will the game be available on?
Into the Depths is confirmed for Windows PC via Steam. Console versions for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, or Xbox have not been announced. The hex-based strategy gameplay and turn-based mechanics could theoretically work on consoles, but indie developers typically focus on PC first before considering ports depending on commercial performance.
Does the game have meta-progression between runs?
Specific meta-progression systems haven’t been detailed in available information. Traditional roguelikes feature permanent death with no carry-over, while many modern roguelites include unlockable content, upgrades, or bonuses that persist between runs. Given Into the Depths’ roguelite classification rather than pure roguelike, some form of progression between runs seems likely but hasn’t been confirmed.
What makes this different from other underground city builders?
Into the Depths distinguishes itself through roguelike structure with short runs instead of persistent fortress building, card-based placement mechanics instead of direct construction, and turn-based strategy rather than real-time management. These differences create a more puzzle-like experience focused on optimization within constrained resources rather than the open-ended sandbox of games like Dwarf Fortress.
Can you demolish structures after placing them?
Yes, you can demolish walls and other structures to reclaim space and make room for new buildings. This addresses one of the key strategic challenges in the cramped underground environment where territory is limited until you build watchtowers or clear existing dungeon structures. Being able to demolish prevents early placement mistakes from ruining entire runs.
Conclusion
Into the Depths represents the kind of creative experimentation that game jams enable, taking a 72-hour prototype and expanding it into a mechanically distinctive commercial release. By combining hex-based city building with roguelike structure and card-based placement, SmelJey has created something that carves out identity in the crowded strategy game space. The underground setting provides natural thematic justification for mechanical choices while creating atmospheric tension as you delve deeper into dangerous caverns seeking riches. Whether the formula successfully merges city building’s strategic depth with roguelike’s replayability depends on execution details only the full release will reveal. The demo offers curious players a risk-free way to test whether card-based underground colonization appeals before the March 2026 launch. For fans of turn-based strategy who enjoy quick sessions over marathon empire building, who appreciate roguelike challenges without twitch reflexes, or who simply want to see how city builders work in cramped underground dungeons, Into the Depths deserves attention. Just remember that when your settlers run out of food in the darkness, there’s no reloading an earlier save. That’s the price of exploring the Depths.