It’s upon us once again. I originally didn’t have a huge inspiration, but here we go yet again.
During the past year I’ve made little experiments with Elder Circle codebase and created a 3d renderer for it. The basic idea is to take the existing tileset and slap it onto procedurally generated simple shapes like boxes, planes and billboards. I use Three.js library for the WebGL rendering, an old familiar I used already back in 2014 7DRL challenge for Golem Quest.
I first developed it with first-person view and while it’s interesting and another type of game might be lurking in there, I don’t think the basic roguelike gameplay works super well in that perspective. Recently I got an idea to try an “isometric” camera which allows me have the gameplay work similarly (e.g. click to move), while still allowing me to play with the 3d gimmick.
So yesterday I started working on a new 7drl, where the idea is that you are a space pirate and you execute heists on different space ships. On top of the 3d renderer (which was partially done before the challenge, but has needed a lot of changes already), I’ve started gathering art for a more sci-fi themed tileset, and blocked out a very basic draft level generator of two spaceships meeting in space for our pirate to board the other through a short spacewalk.
I have also implemented basic ranged combat (which will probably be the major gameplay feature for this year). I already had ranged combat in 2015′s Beware the Space Bears (that used probably the first incarnation of this “engine”), but it was stripped from the code for 2016, and is/will now be a complete rewrite as well as hopefully less awkward UX-wise.
It’s super tempting to play with all the graphical gimmicks a 3d renderer allows, but now that I have the basics working, I hope to first reach some form of gameplay completeness (no great ambitions here really), and then just leisurely tweak visuals the rest of the time. Fingers crossed.