Dungeon is a Java framework for the gamification of educational content, and its main use is didactic escape rooms. Step into a vanished scientist's office and tell real clues from manipulation, program your way through a facility run by an AI that does not tell you everything, or bring a stone golem to life with variables, loops and methods. Students play alone or together over the network and solve subject-related puzzles to get out. The low-code Wizard lets educators build their own rooms without programming.
 The Last Hour (cybersecurity)  |
 System Recovery (arrays in Java)  |
 Das Erbe der Seelenweber (introduction to programming)  |
 Game of Games (work in progress, no release yet) |
The fastest way in is a ready-made package from the releases. For Windows
(<Name>-win-x86_64.zip) and Linux (<Name>-linux-x86_64.tar.gz), Java is included: extract
the archive and start <Name>/<Name>.exe on Windows or <Name>/bin/<Name> on Linux. The
platform-independent <Name>.jar, for example for macOS, needs the
Java SE Development Kit 25 LTS and starts with java -jar <Name>.jar.
To play from source, you also need JDK 25. Clone the repository; Gradle comes with it.
git clone https://github.com/Dungeon-CampusMinden/Dungeon.git
cd Dungeon
./gradlew :game:runTheLastHourOn Windows, use gradlew.bat instead of ./gradlew. Every room in the overview below starts
the same way with its own task.
This project is intended as supplementary teaching material for German-language university courses and is therefore aimed at German-speaking students. If you have any questions, problems or suggestions, please feel free to contact us in English or German.
| Room | Topic | Players | Start | Download |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Last Hour | Cybersecurity: a scientist has vanished. Players search his office, crack codes and tell real clues from manipulation attempts. | 1–2 | ./gradlew :game:runTheLastHour |
Release |
| System Recovery | Programming 1, arrays in Java: energy fields, modules, sorting and two-dimensional data become puzzles in a damaged facility. | 1–2 | ./gradlew :game:runSystemRecovery |
Release |
| Das Erbe der Seelenweber (Soulweaver) | Introduction to programming, first semester: variables and data types, loops, methods and nested conditions, which players use to instruct the golem Nox. | 1–2 | ./gradlew :game:runSoulweaver |
Release |
| Game of Games | Work in progress without a subject concept yet: levers, keypads, pressure plates and pushable stones placed in the level editor. | 1–2 | ./gradlew :game:runGameOfGames |
none yet |
Each room has its own README with a story teaser for players and a section for educators. The detailed concept documents behind them are in German.
Turn your own course material into an escape room. The Wizard guides educators page by page through story, puzzles and game flow in the browser: number codes, multiple-choice questions, matching tasks and information sources to discover, each puzzle with optional graded hints. A check in the background points to anything missing, and at the end the Wizard packs the room into a single JAR file that you hand out to all players. It currently runs locally from the repository; the step-by-step guide explains the setup and walks you through every page.
The DEER-Editor (DEER = Digital Educational Escape Room) is the level editor built into
Dungeon. Paint the map, place decorations and connect ready-made prefabs such as doors, levers,
keypads and pressure plates into puzzles, then press F4 and play what you just built. Every
room above has its own editor task, for example ./gradlew :game:runSoulweaverLevelEditor.
The DEER-Editor guide explains modes, controls and saving.
- Framework documentation and quickstart guide (German)
- Escape room concepts and escape room research and design notes (German)
- Wizard guide and the technical Wizard documentation (German)
- DEER-Editor guide
- Contributing and license rules for assets (German)
- Publications and citation
You can find an interesting report on our project in the news section of Bielefeld University of Applied Sciences (04 April 2024, in German), as well as another press release (19 December 2025, in German). Additionally, a local school has published an article about the project (March 2026, in German).
It is acknowledged that parts of the materials contained in this repository have been developed as part of various publicly funded projects.
Lehr-Escape-Rooms mit LowCode im Dungeon (L<ESC>ROD)
04/2025 - 03/2027, 3003-1271, Freiraum 2025, Stiftung Innovation in der Hochschullehre
Building on the earlier "Dungeon: Learning by Questing" initiative, the project uses the Dungeon framework to design didactic escape rooms in which students collaborate to solve subject-related puzzles. It extends the framework with remote multiplayer and develops a low-code approach that enables educators without programming experience to create their own escape rooms.
Programming Dungeon Adventures at School (PRODUS)
12/2024 - 08/2026, EFRE-20300105, Pakt für Informatik 2.0, EFRE/JTF NRW 2021--27
The project aims to interest school students in the region in STEM subjects, especially computer science, through game-based programming workshops built on Dungeon: Blockly-Dungeon (no-code), Java-Dungeon (low-code, with a Visual Studio Code plugin) and Advanced Dungeon (in-game coding challenges and selected AI topics). It is a collaboration between local schools, companies in the OWL (Ostwestfalen-Lippe) region and Bielefeld University of Applied Sciences (HSBI). Documentation and results are in the dedicated produs repository; more information is on our project page.
Spiele-Framework für Digital Game Based Learning
09/2022 - 11/2023, FRFMM-623/2022, Freiraum 2022, Stiftung Innovation in der Hochschullehre
Instead of programming their own games, students solved subject-specific challenges inside a fully developed game, and an automated analysis detected whether solutions were correct and where students struggled. The tasks were defined in a custom domain-specific language (DSL) that non-programmers can use, and a Petri net-based system adapted the learning paths to the learner.
PM-Dungeon
10/2021 - 11/2022, Fellowships für Innovationen in der digitalen Hochschullehre (digi-Fellows), Ministerium für Kultur und Wissenschaft (MKW) in NRW im Einvernehmen mit der Digitalen Hochschule NRW (DH.NRW)
The project created Open Educational Resources (OER) for teaching programming with Java and built the libGDX-based Dungeon framework, which students of the "Programming Methods" course at HSBI used to develop their own 2D rogue-like games. A submission process called "Deploy to Grading", based on GitHub Actions, gave students immediate feedback on their code through JUnit tests, Checkstyle and similar tools.
Unless otherwise noted, this work by contributors is licensed under MIT.
All files in doc/publication/ are licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
