7DRL is finished (for me, at least).

I had about 6-7 hours of free development time for day 7, so I had to carefully prioritize what I thought would make the gameplay most interesting, engaging and fun... and then I tossed half of that out the window.

What did I do?

• Quality of life adjustments
  • when you deploy the drone, you are immediately controlling it.
  • The player is always shown on top of everything (remember this for later)
• You can walk over stunned guards now. This means that guard bodies don't block important objects, but be quick. If they wake up when you stand on them, they'll throw you.
• Overhauled the way enemy AI worked, to add an "awareness" phase, and a more nuanced detection and seeking behaviour. I think it gets much closer to the Metal Gear Solid -style of AI.

• Added "coins" to the items in the game. Throwing a coin near an unsuspecting guard will distract them for a while. (This required a new state in the state machine, so that they would basically ignore the player unless you get very close to them).

• Added a mechanism for picking up items from the ground and putting them into inventory. I had to stop guards and the drone(!) from picking up the coins before you could.

At this point, it was about midnight, so I deployed the game and made preparations to sleep. Someone in the Roguelike Discord did a playtest and immediately hit a bug. Turns out that my "display the player on top of everything", which was the last thing I did before heading off to sleep, didn't account for the player dying :P So I ran back to fix that, and then slept.

Woke up, with about an hour and a half before the final deadline. My partner and I spoke a bit about what I could do in the remaining time, and among the options, settled for a better end-of-game screen. Ideally calculate a score and make it a little more "shiny" to play again.

It shows you the game seed, but there's no way to provide a seed to the game right now. I'll fix that in a post-7DRL update if there's interest.

What's next?

I'd like to rest for a couple days now. I've been crunching quite hard on this, and it's not been great for my mental health. I'll do bugfixes if any are spotted, but hopefully nothing too serious crops up. I like the systems I put into place with this game, so I may try to continue working on it for a little longer.

I'll probably try to write a postmortem log in a couple days as well, when I can think more clearly.

Enjoy the game, have fun, don't get caught.