7DRL 2017 Reviews Published

Each year a committee of reviewers goes through the successful games from the challenge and gives them ratings on various factors. This helps give developers useful feedback, whilst also sorting out the the cream of the crop for players. The 2017 7DRL reviews are now complete! Check them out, play the heck out of the highlights, and show some love to the developers in the process 🙂

There’s also a 7DRLs 2017 episode of Roguelike Radio, a new series of weekly 7DRL-playing threads at r/roguelikes, and a whole bunch of video Let’s Plays of this year’s games!

Day 14 ~ Gar’s Den is done!

I failed 7DRL but I kept on going and here we are 7 more days later!

Gar’s Den is a gardening roguelike and you can play it there!

Will you enter Gar’s lair, destroy his minions, grow your garden and make lots of $$$, get powerful and make it “Player’s Den”?

!!! GAR's DEN !!!
~ Gar’s Den ~

I’m pretty happy with how things turned out! Making a roguelike was a nice challenge and doing it on Pico-8 made it a thousand times harder because of the code size limitations.

I don’t want to spoil it more so if you have a few minutes, just give it a try? Thank you! 😀

Seven Days to Rogue [Fail]

I kind of knew I would fail this challenge but wanted to start a new prototype and see where it would go.

My idea was a simple roguelike, as you play and level up a random island that you start on grows in size and spawns new items and resources.

I created a simple chunk manager which only held one chunk; am array of tiles. Each tile has a texture(s) and also a box2D collision box. I decided to use box2D to manage the collisions rather than roll my own.

Found a nice tileset http://opengameart.org/content/micro-tileset-overworld-and-dungeon on Open Game Art and started replacing water and grass tile placeholders; made a good start at using all of the tileset:

Made a start adding random items to the map (trees) and notifying the objects of collisions via box2D collision listeners:

Given I was only spending an hour or two each evening working on this I made some progress and made sure the code was clean and efficient, only actually managed 3/4 days out of the seven but am happy with what I got done and will work on this along side other prototypes.

I enjoyed starting a project from scratch and learning more about box2D collisions, there are some great tutorials available at http://www.iforce2d.net/b2dtut/collision-filtering, worth checking out. There is no harm in starting something you know you will fail from the start given you learn by doing so.

 

 

 

 

Ligis [Completed]

This was my first 7DRL. I didn’t think I could finish and was about to chicken out, but I’m glad I didn’t. It’s exciting that I made it in time. You can download the game here.
The game is about a person who decides to climb the tower that belongs to the dark lord who will ‘accept’ you once you reach the final floor. To make it to the next floor, you have to prove your strength(by surviving) and perform a ritual by walking on the ‘correct tiles’. You can discover the correct path by collecting a scroll that reveals them. There will be traps and enemies to hinder your path. Being a regular person, you don’t have any special skills that will help you through this. All you have is your own fist. You can move the character with arrow keys, and attack the enemy by walking in the direction of the enemy.
I managed to make something playable, but it has much room for features and polishing. Here are some highlights on what I think what went right and what went wrong.
What went right:
  • Reduction of scope although the original idea is way cooler.
    • First roguelike I played was ADOM and I was thinking of making something similar, where you crawl through dungeon floors of rooms and corridors, having to be careful of sudden deaths, except you have to look for a ‘key’ for the next floor, where the key shows a sigil you have to ‘draw’ in a room by walking over the correct tiles. Kind of like a ritual. You were going to have to find the right room where the key will shine bright. But because I didn’t have any assets or codes I could re-use, I thought maybe I will not have enough time to generate a huge dungeon floor and test it out. I reduced ‘the whole dungeon floor’ into two rooms, one with random walls between the player and the key scrolls and the other room for drawing out the right path. It turned out to be a great decision since I just made it in time to publish something playable with latter scope.
  • Introduction of the Bouncer.
    • Having just regular monsters attack you with melee wasn’t fun in the Ritual Room (the room where you have to walk only on certain tiles.) Unless there are so many of them, all you had to do was ignore them and walk the path. They will be busy following you and may not even be able to attack you. So I introduced an enemy which bounces you off to the next tile. Since the player is pushed off to another tile, I didn’t further punish the player with damage. However, if the Bouncer tries to push the player but if there is something blocking player from moving, the player will take stronger damage than he would get from the other enemy. To prevent the Bouncer from becoming the OP, I gave it a handicap where he has to rest one turn after attacking. I think the introduction of the Bouncer made players not play the game mindlessly and made the game more fun than how it would have been. While I still mourn at the lack of variety of enemies, I’m happy that I made the Bouncer into this game.
  • Borrowing a third eye
    • I’ve asked a friend to try playing the game while I was finishing up the audio part of the game. He caught several things to improve/fix, such as disappeared HELP text, a ‘hack’ where you could roam around the floor freely, allowing you to abuse and level up some more before proceeding, and some sound effect issue. He made my last hour busy and made the game more complete that it would have been.
What went wrong:
  • Sprites should have been polished when I was importing them in the first place.
    • It would have taken me maybe additional 5 minutes to at least remove the ‘background’ of the sprite I downloaded and make it transparent. I thought I’ll do them on the last day, but I had more work to do than I thought and eventually couldn’t polish them.
  • Difficulty and Enemy power balance.
    • I pushed this out to the last day thinking it will be straight forward, but this was a surprising challenge. I ended up with some formula through trial-and-error, but I was running out of time and couldn’t test out whether this is the best formula for the game. I worry that the game starts too easy then become too difficult.
  • Disappoint result of one of the key features: the sigils in the ritual room.
    • I should have had some manual drawings of the sigils along with my random generator. Instead of the paths you have to walk on shaping something cool looking or panning through the room, it looks like a lump of area most of the time. This kind of defies the challenge introduced by the Bouncer. The algorithm for generating the random path should have been better.
  • Lots of features were abandoned, intro and outro texts were winged.
    • Many of the abandoned features due to lack of time, ironically, wouldn’t have taken much time. These include camera shake, more variety of traps, more variety of enemies, more ‘cause of death’ descriptions, simple animation to indicate the direction of attack which was going to be even universal among all player & enemies. They are mostly more details to the game play, but since they don’t belong in ‘the core mechanics’, I pushed them for later and eventually didn’t have time to get them done. If I would have done some of them, little bit at a time, while I was working on the core gameplay, I could have had a little more polished game overall and wouldn’t have impacted the schedule by that much.
7DRL was an absolutely great experience. I’m seeing a lot of creative/visually appealing entries. Looking forward to trying them out.

Undertiled [7DRL 2017] [Success]

Download(Windows ,Linux, Mac, WebGL)

Undertiled is a procedurally generated puzzle game. The game consists of 6 randomly generated tile Levels. Your goal is to manage and find the hidden “ladder” tile of each level that will lead you to the next. To do that you need to collect information about the location of the ladder, from the various tile types on each tile map  before your turns go below 0. When you think you know where the “ladder” tile is hiding use the Dig button on that tile to confirm your guess.

This is my first ever “completed” game in playable form, although I want to improve it and polish it more in the near future. I am pretty new to game development and I used the 7DRL challenge as an opportunity to learn more about game programming and force my self to make an actually playable game. I would really appreciate any kind of feedback from you all since I want to know what people think of my work, what I do wrong, what I do right, and how I can improve.

Thanks for your time and I hope you might have a little bit of fun with this small project. Good luck!

P.S. Some important rules that I haven’t included in the in game “Game Rules” section of the current build are:

– The ladder can’t spawn at “Master Tile”.

– The ladder can’t spawn at an “Info Tile”.

– The ladder can’t spawn at the special “Distance” tile.

PokemonRL – Completed

Managed to finish a playable version for the challenge, check it out here!

How to play

Your goal is to become a Pokemon master by defeating the gym leaders of the 8 cities in your region.

Look for the Professor’s lab in your home town to pick your starter pokemon (using ,). Then find the exit to route 1 from your hometown.

When you find wild pokemon, use “r” to release your selected pokemon in a given direction. He will automatically fight nearby enemies with his default skill

If you want to use a different skill, press the key as indicated on the right bar

To call back your pokemon, use “P”

To use pokeballs or potions, go to the “I”nventory and select a direction

Keyboard Commands

Arrow keys Move around.
I Show Inventory.
, Pick up items and pokeballs.
1 to 6 Select pokemon slot.
R Release selected pokemon.
P Pull back selected pokemon.
Z,X,C,V Use pokemon skills.

Myst [Success]

Windows, Mac OS: https://watabou.itch.io/myst
Android and HTML versions are coming soon.

animated screenshot

A cursed mist covers the wood. This mist swallows anyone who steps into it, but you are safe while your magic torch is burning. Fight spirits of the mist, collect runes to reveal the Spirit King and slay him to dispel the mist.

This is a compact rogue-lite game where you need to traverse an ever-changing maze. The only part of it that does not change is the part which is not covered by the mist. Use it to your advantage.

  • Collect “fire” runes to replenish your torch level
  • Collect “blood” runes to replenish your health level
  • Collect 5 “way” runes to make a Guardian Spirit reveal himself
  • Spirits do not attack you, but they chase you and may drive you into a corner
  • Avoid attacking spirits when their eyes are glowing (especially red), because that’s when they are most dangerous

For some reason I honestly thought that “myst” was an alternative spelling for “mist”, probably obsolete or something. And now the game has a logo, so it’s too late to change anything 🙂