7 Day Roguelike Challenge is here again!
Soon after last year's Cosmic Corsair I decided that I want to try to make my 7drl codebase more like an "engine", so that it's easier to make and maintain games and keep game-specific stuff better contained.
At some point I will probably write something more focused on that, but suffice to say here that I did manage to port my earlier games originating from this code to mostly work concurrently with the same framework code. So each game is mainly just different graphics, configuration and level generation setup, with some custom UIs etc. sprinkled on top.
But that was last year and now the real test is trying to create a new a game with this setup and that's what part of this year's challenge is for me. The other part is to add some new feature to the engine and focus the game around that.
The gimmick of this game will be throwable potions with area-of-effects. In fact I'm trying to make the combat revolve solely around throwing consumable, explosive potions.
I started on Sunday morning by copy-pasting Elder Circle (refactored "engine" version) for a base, but because I liked it, I configured rendering to use the 3d "isometric" setup I had in Cosmic Corsair. Though with a slight tilt on camera for added coolness :).
I changed level generation from the Elder Circle's open world to a simple basic placeholder dungeon, and started working on "hotbar" inventory UI for selecting items more easily and a targeting UI to throw them, with an area indicator. This can be seen in the screenshot above as the red crosses.
I also wanted a change from the fantasy tileset I've used for like 3 games, so spend a little time looking, and I'm now testing "Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup" tiles which at least have a lot of sprites to choose from, and while I've not been a huge fan of the saturated look when running across those before, I think I can make it work in my dark-ish 3d lit environment, and am already liking the initial version (same picture above).
One problem is that while the tileset does have a ton of items and enemies, it is light on furniture, so not sure how much room variations I can come up with. But on the otherhand, I could take this as a challenge: make a game only using these tiles instead of spending time compiling tileset with everything I theoretically might want.
Anyway, on Monday I should try to work on the potion throwing system more, to create damaging fires and such things. Unless working on levelgen and graphics tempts me too much.
