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Finished!

Catacombs
A browser game made in HTML5

My #7DRL game, Catacombs, is done! Play it here.

Overall I feel pretty good about the challenge, and the game. I kept the game within scope, and delivered a small, decently polished experience.

First, a couple shout-outs to other creators whose assets I used:

Let's do a mini post-mortem!

Things that went pretty well:

  • Started with an existing turn-based prototype, in my custom HTML5 stack. This really let me hit the ground running in terms of going straight to gameplay and content.
  • Leveraged existing tools, like Tiled
  • Simple tweaks to standard roguelike mechanics (permadeath, hunger clock)
  • Arcade style, endless meta game (easy to implement, no bosses, etc)

Things that didn't go so well:

  • Procedural generation. I didn't end up with as much variety/emergence as I would have liked because of  an overly simple procedural generator. (Floors are static with 1-4 object layout variants, and I only made 5 floors)

Feels good to ship something small and complete. Looking forward to doing this again in 2021 :)

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