Welcome to Azthengar

Today, after a long and honestly stupid day at work, I did what I usually do. I came home, cleared my head, and let my thoughts wander. Somewhere in that haze, a question hit me harder than anything else:

What is outside the castle?

Up until now, Azthengar has been exactly what it set out to be. A roguelike CRPG, fifty floors deep, filled with chaos, danger, and that constant push forward toward the final confrontation with the evil King Azthengar. Beat him, and the game doesn’t end. It keeps going. Endless mode. A descent that never truly stops.

That was the vision.

But lately, something has been bothering me.

You start in the castle. You live in the castle. You fight through the castle. But what about everything beyond it? What exists in the world outside those walls?

That question has been sitting in the back of my mind, and now I can’t ignore it.

So I started building it.

The surface.

A village. Empty. Silent. Something clearly went wrong there long before the player ever arrived. No life. No voices. Just wind moving through dead streets. It already feels different from the dungeon. Not safer, just… wrong in a quieter way.

And from there, it didn’t stop.

Because once you step outside the castle, the question gets bigger. Much bigger.

Does Azthengar stay a dungeon crawler, or does it become something more? A full world? A place where you can wander beyond the known, explore distant places, and uncover things that were never meant to be found?

I started thinking about expanding it further. Villages. Regions. Maybe one day even something as large as a country. But then reality kicks in. That means systems. Dialogue. NPCs. Structure. And I’ll be honest, part of me immediately pushes back on that.

That’s not what this is.

Azthengar has always been raw. Built piece by piece by someone who didn’t come from a programming background. No fancy systems. No over-designed mechanics. Just something real, something being shaped over time.

So instead of overcomplicating it, I leaned into something else.

Atmosphere. Danger. Ideas.

And that’s where things started to get interesting.

Because if the world exists beyond the castle, then it shouldn’t be normal. It shouldn’t be safe. It should feel just as unhinged as what lies below.

So now, outside the castle, there are things waiting.

Skeletons wandering through a dead village.

And deeper still…

A forest.

A large one.

And inside it, creatures that should not exist.

Fairies.

Not the kind you’re used to. Not harmless, glowing companions. These are violent, bloodthirsty things. Fast. Unpredictable. Wrong.

Flesh-eating fairies.

Yeah. That’s in the game now.

And honestly, that’s the direction this is heading. Not just building a game, but discovering what it becomes as it grows. Letting it evolve naturally instead of forcing it into something it was never meant to be.

Because at the end of it all, that question doesn’t just belong to the player.

It belongs to all of us.

What’s out there?

And maybe, just maybe, Azthengar is how I find out.