Posted March 08, 2023 by Aviv
As predicted, day 3 wasn’t particularly productive, although it wasn’t a complete write-off.
I’ve been thinking pretty hard about the color palette for the game. I enjoy working on games with a restricted palette, but picking the right one, with appropriate colors to convey a certain atmosphere is quite a challenge.
I thought I’d try my hand at actually composing my own palette this time, based on a couple I saw online. Here’s the end result:
The intention is to focus on purples, reds and paler whites/lilac, with the occasional splash of the others for points of interest on the map and in the UI.
I implemented a new system where I can define a palette, but rather than use the palette directly, drawn things specify a purpose, and those purposes can be mapped (and remapped) to colors in the palette. This should allow for easily swapping out palettes in the future if needed.
I re-worked the game cover image using the new palette and I think it looks pretty nice.
I squeezed a tiny bit of functional enhancement into the game before the day ended: A scroll of lightning.
Following the tutorial, the scroll of lightning targets the nearest enemy and summons a bolt of lightning to smite them (or at least wound).
It didn’t turn out to be too difficult to implement, which gives me hope for the future.
The rest of this tutorial chapter (part 9) covers ranged targeting and area of effect actions, which will be useful for some future magic systems, so I’m looking forward to implementing those things. It also introduces status conditions to the engine, adding some depth and unpredictability to combat.
After that, I’m going to skip part 10, which covers saving and loading of runs: For a 7DRL, I don’t expect the game to take long enough to require a pause in the middle. There are sufficient hooks in the system to serialise things to a file if needed, but deserialisation isn’t implemented yet, and there’s higher priority tasks. Skipping this now means that what follows will be the descent into the dungeon.
That’s something I’ve never had in my previous roguelikes, they’ve always been a single floor, and I am excited to finally be able to add that feature easily to the toolkit.
Until then, safe delving!