Frequently Asked Questions

What is Dial-Up Dungeon?

Dial-Up Dungeon is a pixel art chatroom built in the spirit of the early web. Its rooms are gathered into four regions, each with its own palette and sound, and conversation happens in real time in front of animated backdrops. It is a small and deliberately slow corner of the internet, made for friends to hang out, roleplay, or co-exist while doing other things.

What can you do here?

You can chat in real time, talk with push-to-talk voice, share a webcam, pin images and queue YouTube videos for the room, keep a short friends list, send crows, idle quietly in the background while you work, roleplay and roll dice, draw your own pixel avatars, and host a room of your own.

There is no "game" here in the usual sense, and that is on purpose: gamification is kept deliberately thin, with EXP the only thing that moves around. Individual room owners of course can do whatever they like with their rooms and how it's used.

In the future, we may expand on custom-built mechanics further to allow more custom room features and custom user interactions with modularity in mind.

Who made this?

Dial-Up Dungeon is made by me, Parallax. The art, the code, the rooms, and the tooling behind them are all built by hand. You can read more about how it is put together here on my blog.

Do I need an invite to join?

No. The gates are open: anyone 18 or older can sign up. Invite links still work too, if a friend wants to bring you in personally.

Does it cost anything?

No. Dial-Up Dungeon is free to use, and it stays free in the ways that matter. Your standing in the world is never for sale, and there are no microtransactions. That is a deliberate design pillar, and it will not change. You cannot buy a finer avatar or pay to stand out.

Hosting your own room is a small extra: a $1.99 a month subscription that helps keep the servers running. It is a thank you for the running costs, never a paywall on the dungeon itself, and you can cancel at any time.

How do levels work?

EXP is earned passively by spending time inside a chatroom: 1 point for every 5 minutes you are sitting in a room, up to 100 a day. You don't have to chat. Just being in the room counts. As your EXP grows you level up, and levels unlock small powers, like /summon weather in chat. There is nothing to spend and no currency to chase.

Can I make my own avatar?

Yes. Every visitor begins with a simple face, and you can draw your own in Pixellax, a small pixel editor built into the site. You keep a few avatar slots, and the one you mark as primary is what other dwellers see beside your name. Patrons get a few more slots. The Avatar Library lets you publish your avatars so others can use them as a template or wear them as their own.

What are crows?

Crows are the dungeon's private letters/Async Direct Messages. When you send one to someone in another room, a crow carries it across the map and it takes 30 to 60 seconds to arrive. In the same room it is instant. Crows carry letters only. Your friends list holds up to 30 people.

Is my voice or webcam recorded?

No. Voice and webcam are off by default and opt in for each device. When you use them, the audio and video travel directly between the people in the room and are never stored on our servers. Treat them as you would any public room, because anyone present with the feature on can hear or see you.

Do you sell my data or run ads?

No. We do not sell or share your data, and there are no third party trackers or advertisements anywhere on the site. The full account of what we keep and why is written plainly on the policies page.

Does this site use generative AI art?

No, all of the art assets on this website are made by me, Parallax. Each pixel is pushed by a human finger. For the background scenes, I made an app with Godot called Diorama to place and orient 3D assets and export them through my rendering pipeline for the pixelized retro effect. I go through the steps I took to make this on my blog post here.

What did you use to build this?

Dial-Up Dungeon is a SvelteKit application written in TypeScript, served by a single Node process. The live chat, presence, and crows run over a custom WebSocket layer. The pixel art I make using Aseprite.

I tried to keep it looking and feeling old-school while keeping modern web development standards up to par. TypeScript + Sveltekit allows me to build a component-based custom components and iterate fast wand keeps things super lightweight.

Why did you make this?

I have been building web experiences for more than ten years, and somewhere along the way modern web design made everything really boring. As AI and vibe coding spread, I found myself missing the web as a place more than ever.

When I was younger I used to spend a lot of time on forums or places like Gaia Online, Club Penguin, Neopets and not to mention countless hundreds and hundreds of hours in MMORPG's like Everquest and WoW.

As I got older, I stopped playing a lot of these social online games and the internet itself just sort of... changed. Flash died. Everything became templated, framework-driven. Dead Internet Theory has never been more true now than ever.

Sure, it could just be chalked up to nostalgia and I know people are out there still making cool things on the web.

But in the end I wanted to build something fun. A place that people could gather and talk with other interesting humans in a curated, somewhat anonymous setting that had real vibes. And so the dungeon was born.