#sevendayroguelike

[chaoat]

Oh SHIT, I forgot that the tumblr bots ban deserts now. That’s extremely unfortunate for my latest project.

Lets see if this gif gets through.

I guess I’m gonna just have to wait for it to get appealed.

In the mean time, there’s a 700ish post mortem to look forward to.

[chaoat]

7DRL 2019 - I of the Storm

I did 7DRL again this year, with great success.

I don't remember exactly how the idea came to me, but I wanted to do something where attacks were triggered by specific sequences of movement. For instance, moving left left right might trigger an explosion or something. Other than that, my other key restraint was the knowledge of how little time I was going to have this time around, so my scope had to be quite small.

So after much deliberation my basic design came out as follows.

Spells are cast by moving in specific patterns.

These spells confer a variety or buffs, or trigger a variety of attacks.

These spells are used to defeat incoming waves of enemies in an arena.

I went with the arena approach so that I didn't have to deal with level generation, which always takes up a large portion of time.

There were a couple more aesthetic choices that I wanted to play around with too, specifically I wanted to try messing around with a non-fixed tile system similar to what I used in 7DRL 2017. The 'dancing' combat system reminded me of a dervish, or a monk type character, so setting the game in an Arabian desert made sense, which then led into the connection with the tile system, having the arena be the cleared center of a sand storm(this also provided the title, "I of the Storm").

As well as that broad overview, there were a couple design decisions I made that shaped the game a fair bit:

No variable direction arrows/patterns are always the same

I've finally learnt my lesson after all these years, and accepted that greater complexity and choice does not necessarily mean greater strategy. Oftentimes it can just mean greater confusion. So, instead of deciding on an overly complicated system at the start and having to remove it later like last year, I just put my foot down at the start and decided that I would have no arrows changing directions.

I thought this was going to mean that I couldn't have any aimed attacks, but I got around that later on by having aimed attacks targeted by the move you take immediately after completing the pattern.

Limited number of rounds, ending with a boss

I've had a philosophy for a while now, that in general endless games are a bad idea. This is because with an endless game, the 'end' is the point where the player gets bored and stops playing, and the player is therefore left with a bad experience of the game. Following this idea, I decided to have the game run for a limited amount of time, and end with a larger boss enemy.

So, with those ideas in mind, I got to work.

There weren't really any noteworthy points in development(unlike last time), just progress as usual until it was done.

I was happy in the end with how it turned out. It ended up about how I had envisioned it, which is as much as anyone can hope for really. I managed to implement a decent number of different spells to play around with, and the difficulty was sitting in a pretty good spot I think.

My biggest failure this time around was two part, but was mostly to do with forgetting about accessibility. Firstly, the spinning storm effect turned out to make people pretty sick sometimes. I actually predicted this one near the start, but for some reason I convinced myself over the period of the jam that it wasn't going to be a problem, so I never implemented a toggle to turn it off. The second issue was that the text size was quite small, due to how many words I wanted to fit in the description boxes, and the low resolution that I like to design for (just in case people are playing on laptops or something, you know). I fixed both of these post jam, but I really should have predicted this and added in countermeasures before the end.

For anyone wondering why I wrote all that flavour text for everything, I've just kind of been in a writy mood recently. I've been reading the Necronomicon, so a lot of the descriptive style was inspired by Lovecraft's stories. Most people probably won't read it, but I'm hoping those that do find it enjoyable. Copious writing is something that I find a lot of people don't bother with these days, but I find it enjoyable, and I feel it's a good goal to try and make things that you yourself would enjoy.

So yeah, that's how 7DRL went this year for me.

If you want to check out what I’ve been writing about for the last 750 words, link here.

I’ll return back to COLD development now, so expect updates on that in not-too-long. Baba is you also came out yesterday though, so it might be a bit longer than otherwise expected.