This sounds really interesting! I'm looking forward to keeping up with your dev progress. Have you heard of or played the recently released dungeon crawler BELOW? Your description reminds me a bit of that, especially the part about "keeping the darkness at bay". Could be worth taking a look if you haven't already. Good luck!
I personally have not, but I'll totally look into it! If you want to keep up with my development progress, our website's where I will be spamming updates with descriptions of what is getting done, screenshots of the work in progress, and general information on gameplay as it's updated! You can also like our Facebook page, but the website's where the majority of updates will be.