7DRL

The ratings for the entries in this year’s 7DRL – 7 Day Rogue-Like – game design challenge are in, and my entry, World of Roguecraft, is in the top 95%! So grats me ;) My game had its best scores in aesthetics (2/3) and scope (1.67/3). Can’t argue with that. I spent too much time working on the game engine and not enough on the game. Next year, I’m going to take the hint and work on my game engine ahead of time, leaving the seven days of the competition focused entirely on making a game. That’s what the winner did, and is within the bounds of the challenge as long as you note that your game is built on a game engine. ...

When I started with the 7DRL game design challenge, I’d set a timeline. I would need to get all the game mechanics done by last Sunday, so I could focus on adding content to the game, doing balancing, playtesting the game, polishing it to a fine sheen, until today it would burst on the scene like a supernova. I’d be getting piles of emails from indie game studios asking if I wanted to work on some cool projects, doors would open and angels would fly out begging me to expand the game into some monster AAA title and I…. ...

Monday evening, I understood what my game wanted to be about. Tuesday, I realized that the game was horribly, horribly flawed. Coming in, all I really knew I wanted to do was the graph paper-like room generation, and I hoped the rest of the game would occur to me as I was doing that. And it did – it just turned out to be a different game than the one I was writing. ...

For those people who don’t care about the 7DRL game design challenge, don’t worry – things will be back to normal this weekend. I’ve just finished day 3 of the seven days, and I’ve almost finished the basic mechanics. Today I added the inventory system and integrated it into the targeting window. You can only wield one item at a time; I’m not going to bother with armor and that stuff. If you want to use something, you will be holding it. ...

My 7DRL entry is moving along, but it’s not moving quickly. I’d said even before I started this that, given a full time job, how the game was at the end of Sunday – today – is how it would have to be. I ALMOST got inventory in today; it is partially in, but I need to display it, and I will get to that, but it will likely be the last feature I implement. I need to start adding in the content. ...

I started working on my entry to the annual 7DRL (7 Day Rogue-like) game design challenge today. I’ve been working on algorithms for the game for the past week; today I took the algorithms for map generation and room connectivity and put them into real code. It turned out pretty much exactly as I imagined – I am going for a game that looks like it’s being played with toys on a map drawn with marker on graph paper. When I got it first working, I realized I needed a way to show where you had already been, so I draw visited rooms in a muted shade to give the player SOME idea when they’ve cleared the map. ...

I’ve decided to take the jump and enter the Seven Day Roguelike (7DRL) competition starting next month. The challenge? Write a complete “rogue-like” adventure game in just seven days. The additional challenge is that these include WORKING days, so there’s far less time in which to do it. My first inclination was to do it in Python with the PyGame SDL libraries on Linux. Trouble is, nobody will ever see the game that way. So while talking with Kasul last night, I decided to reach deep into my past and write it as a Java applet. ...