itch.io

It's plenty. Don't even worry about it!

Thank you! 

Day 7+1 - Saturday 7th of March 2026

I've submitted the game!

I might patch the engine in the future  in case people report issues. I also have to add a audio volume slider and other options.

I'll write a little post mortem later. 

Day 7 - Friday 6th of March 2026

The game is DONE

Thanks to my good friend JL for playtesting the RC build. He was able to complete the game which is great news.

I added some better communication for the controls, fixed a couple of small issues and did other basic housekeeping. I still gotta take the screenshots, write the description, gather credits for external assets used, that kinda stuff.

I will release this publicly tomorrow at noon my local time (GMT+2). Usually what happens at this point is that a new totally game exploding bug is discovered and it's panic mode.

So when this post is about 17 hours old, the game is out.

Happy crunching to fellow 7DRL26 participants. You can do it!!

Day 6 - Thursday 5th of March 2026

Cheers to testers! I'm changing the password now as I'm uploading a release candidate build which I'll be testing on any device I get my hands on.

I'm not going to even try supporting mobile devices, it's a madness world to debug and I haven't optimized the controls for touch screens.

Been doing some background shader programming, trying to make a crow... this is based on an old sketch in Shadertoy. Still learning but it's fun

Day 5 - Wednesday 4th of March 2026

I fixed the framebuffer related issue in Firefox. A test build without gameplay is now available in case you want to help me test whether this will run on your machine:

https://nmcela.itch.io/ajatar - Password: Kalevala

Any info is much appreciated. It should run at least on Macbook Pro M Firefoxes and Chromes, hopefully at least 60fps.

# Day 4 - Tuesday 3rd of March 2026

Playtesting and polishing, this is a weird little game. Now'd be a perfect time to find someone else to playtest, good thing I got a nephew with the brutal honesty mode still on

For the logo, I think it's a good opportunity to use a figlet font given the ASCII aesthetics and the lack of an artist. This is a great tool for that: https://patorjk.com/software/taag/#p=display&f=Tmplr

I might go with Tmplr:

Tomorrow I might setup the itch.io page and upload a placeholder intro screen build for QA. There's always some (OpenGL) issues to fix. At the moment it works with macOS Chrome, but Firefox has some error I need to check. I'll probably ship the native macOS build too, and add Linux and Winblows builds later

Thanks!

I just grabbed a guitar, pressed record and started playing without thinking about it too much. It's a chill thing to do after programming as long as you don't have any expectations for the quality of the recording. That said, it's ofc always good to have as much raw material as early as possible. It takes time for ideas to develop.

Day 3 - Monday 2nd of March 2026

I have been adding as much items and other entities as possible trying to get most of the kkontent done so that it can be then balanced. These are quite fast to add fortunately, just lines on a json file.

I stumbled upon the unscii font a while back: http://viznut.fi/unscii/, great work by Viznut. I'm using the unscii-16 variation:

That's only a small fraction of the total amount of glyphs - there are a lot. macOS luckily ships with a good enuf tool FontBook to search through them:

... so I don't have to step into the trap of creating an in-game editor viewer tool for now. The hex value U+0040 is the key UUID there which you unfortunately can't copy in anyway, so you have to squint your eyes, carefully write it down by hand, and make mistakes every single time.

Regarding the rendering, I'm not doing it as regular console text. I separated the glyphs to PNG files, used TexturePacker to export them into a sprite atlas that is then loaded into the engine's typical 2D sprite and tile renderers.

Next, a break

Day 2 - Sunday 1st of March 2026

I've been working on enemy behaviours, bow mechanics, simple GUI and a bunch of random stuff. I wanted to get most of the raw programming work done as I have work next week so I wanna dedicate the nights for general polish and fine tuning.

Last night I also recorded a sketch for the intro screen theme loop: 

 (Warning - rough mix): https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/2dvbfnavrhaaw01c30225/AuroWave6-unmixed-sketch.wa...

Not sure if I'll go with this but most players won't ever hear it anyway so let's see. It could use a lead guitar melody and other stuff.

Next up: the story

Day 1 - Saturday 28th of February 2026

Today I've managed to put together the basics of the high level roguelike flow: traversing the dungeons, ascending deeper, fighting and looting. For the record, no LLMs were used, these features were just fast to add based on the old game code. Making them interesting is the tricky part.

For the dungeons, I have two generators to work with.

Very basic cellular automata caves:

And crappy looking delanay triangulated rooms:

In the screenshots you also see a player character wielding a bow as I decided to focus on ranged combat mechanics. There's also doors and an open portal.

Day 0 - Friday 27th of February 2026

Okay a 7DRL 2026 entry called Ajatar is hereth by announced (for the 2nd time), no going back now.

Welcome to the devlog, I'll be posting one update per day. In my local time, the jam starts officially in a few hours.

I'm creating the game with C++ and OpenGL and it will be playable in browser. I'm forking an old hobby project as it has all the basic low-to-mid level stuff implemented like 2D graphics, audio, basic dungeon generators, etc.

Here's a rough looking screenshot of what the starting point is based on the fork, a player inside a room with a door:

In the next 7 days, I have to implement the game itself.

The name comes from Ajattara, a spirit that chases something. :D That might be a clue of the mechanics, we'll see

This is a devlog for a 7DRL 2026 entry called Ajatar.

Yeah, I just read the "[itch.io] 7DRL Challenge 2026 has started" email and didn't check further. But even later my eyes did automatically adblock the giant red box with an alert sign :D

Oh damn just realized this too, I already posted a devlog as well :D removed it for now though. I sort of started already by preparing a build by forking an older project, I hope that's fine. Other than that, I'll wait until tomorrow then.