Hi!

I'm having a plan on doing a 3D first person dungeon crawler. I'm doing the prototype with fantasy items (sword, cave setting, etc..), but I'm a sci-fi fan. I love game that is sci-fi. So, I was thinking about putting the game into sci-fi setting. But I'm having a hard time about melee weapons. Lightsabers are out, of course :P Energy swords? Or staffs? With ranged weapons, it's ok. I can drop in some guns, or something. And with enemies? Robots, aliens? And I'm not sure even if the dungeon crawler genre fits the scifi theme

Your dungeon crawler can be the bowels of a large ship, the ancient ruins of an extinct alien race or possibly even the Death Star (except that entire IP issue of course).

Your melee weapons can be part of your powered armour space suit i.e. metal fists of fury! or blades that can be extended ala wolverine or Deux Ex (human revolution)

Your enemies can be both mechanical i.e. part of the ships maintenance crew or security systems (or even the alien species behind the ship) or they could be organic life forms such as aliens could also consist of escaped live specimens, the alien version of human pests i.e. rats, the remnants of the alien crew, other aliens who have also entered the ship or they could be software i.e. "the red queen" in resident evil or the AI from system shock or ...and the possibilities are endless.

Hope this helps kickstart you :)

Ooooo, thank you! That truly gave me some inspiration! Woah... :)

Even in a sci-fi setting, there's something to be said for a big wrench or a pipe or a long heavy chain for melee weapons. Improvised weapons like that could help you offer a variety of hand-to-hand tools in a setting that wouldn't have a lot of swords and halberds in it.

I'd say there's lots of opportunity for sci-fi dungeon crawls. That's pretty much the whole plot of Prometheus, after all.

There are entire sci-fi franchises that rely on melee weapons: Gordon Freeman's crowbar in HalfLife, the Zealot's Psionic Blades in StarCraft, Lightsabers in Star Wars, pretty much the entirety of the WarHammer universe...

One can utilise a variety of justifications to enable melee weapons in a game full of ranged weapons:

• Scarcity of ammo, or unreliability of guns (Half Life)
• A stealth mechanic, to allow silent melee kills (Deus Ex)
• Personal shields that let reduce the effectiveness of ranged attacks (Halo)
• Abilities that let you stun enemies, so that you can close and melee them (Bioshock)

You wanna have a look at the game Hired Guns by DMA Design. You should be able to find the PC version floating around somewhere bundled with Dosbox. I don't know whether you mean block based dungeon crawler, TBH it doesn't really matter, Hired Guns should definitely give you some thematic inspiration.