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A member registered Mar 02, 2019 · View creator page →
Creator of
A traditional roguelike set in dank derelict spaceships, searching for scrap to survive
Role Playing
A traditional roguelike set amongst the moving platforms of the Tetronimo Tomb
Role Playing
Recent community posts
Day 6
Finally got all the enemy types in as well as moving and dying when injured, as well as card graphics, and also damage indicators which will be be important for an understanding of the consequences of a particular move. Also three level themes, starting with the forest seen below (having just jumped down a hole in a forest, this seems apt for the first levels).
This is going to sound crazy, but the game doesn't really play yet - the enemies have AI that positions them for attacks, but doesn't execute them yet.. so for 6 days I've been running on the hope that this whole idea actually works, because if it doesn't I've really painted myself into a corner! I may be starting on the last day, but it's technically Saturday morning and I started on Sunday midday - so really have until then and I can pull an all-nighter to keep polishing if I need, effectively giving me an additional day's of dev time. We'll see...
Day 5
With only 2 days to go I'm swinging between feeling like I have it under control, to being behind. I keep getting pulled back by additional clean-up detail like audio, and dual control with mouse/keyboard - I've never had audio or mouse in any game I've made before, so this really is a mold breaker. I got a start on all the attack cards, including working out what they do, how they upgrade, and how they go from being picked in the hand to applied on the board (different cards have different ranges, directions, may or may not be blocked by enemies etc). They aren't quite ready, but I really need to focus on a complete game to feel better about my timeline so that's today's job - enemy types, AI, and dungeon generation. Where previous years map generation has taken multiple days thanks to the sprawling nature of my past games, this will pretty much just be placement in the one room per level. Once that's done I can go back to the extensible stuff, like more or less cards, depending on how much time I have at the end.
Below is the current state of shield, spear and wand, but I also have sword, bow, axe, and dart
Day 4
Progressing alright, but definitely feeling the pressure - I'm hoping the time left is enough, it sure helps that I've taken the week off work but I still only have 3 days!
The code base is really turning into a mess, I have a lot of animations and transitions and stuff, and rather than having a central controller for timing and input handling under certain conditions (e.g. disabled while transitioning) I've just added timer after timer, and there's a mess of "if this timer running do not do". I also have a lot of magic numbers to place things just so, which in some cases need to be kept consistent with other magic numbers making changing things hard. My HandHandler class is now 1600 lines long because it handles logic it's not supposed to and so much more! I will definitely be throwing this game in the bin after the competition is over, but keeping on with 3D in general for sure. I'm learning a lot!
I have effectively completed the card handling, and I added functionality to view the deck, upgrade/delete cards, and select new cards from an offering.
This is pretty much done, including card upgrade ability which as can see below adds a + to the attack title, and doesn't allow upgrade of energy cards above level 5.
I did this after the "level up" cards though so they are added to the hand and handled there - I'll probably move them over to the new system
Day 3
Got some load-in working for the hero and enemies (which currently cannot be interacted with),, as well as hatches to the next level and reload for the following level. I also hacked in the win/death screen from last year's 7drl because well why reinvent the wheel - has a bit of touch up of course to suit 3d look and feel.
Also did a lot of work on the hand, drawing, discarding, and refreshing the draw when empty - it looks nice!
Day 2
Polished off the menus screen with working card options, as well as sound and music. It's really hard to find good SFX, I bought several SFX/music bundles from humble but they're all useless jangling chimes, squelches, zapows, and kachonks all with reverberations, faint staticy noise over the top like a bad recording, start at like 300ms into the clip and other stuff that makes it all really hard to use. Where is a soft quick paf for a click, a short soft sh for moving cards? Finding good sounds is like finding good graphics, it they're bad they can put the whole experience off...
Anyway, also got a transition into and back out of the game screen, as well as some basic structure for the game itself, including moving guy. I need to remember to stop nit-picking minor details though, considering this year I still need to write the whole engine from scratch.
Day 1
To assist my ramping up with the 3d tools, I have completed a little 3d vignette for the menu screen. I'm trying to keep things clean, but it's tricky - there are quite a few components to 3d work (especially when you aren't importing models) so it took longer than I hoped to put this together. Still it looks pretty good. I also have a rain animation that I might try to fit in, but we'll see. Another cool thing is that it currently runs at an eye watering 1600 fps, and while I have a kinda beefy computer it's good to know there's a lot of room for extras even at the low end.
Thankfully I ended up with some time left over after putting the little scene together, so I got a start on the hand of cards, and ray-picking when I mouse over to focus on that particular card. In the menu screen, I'll use cards as a stand-in for a more boring button menu. Ups downs tilts zlayers it's way more complex than 2d work but much more rewarding...
Moving the camera like this makes gifs huge though, so sorry about the quality!
7DRL Challenge 2023 community » Q&A · Created a new topic Can we add a section in this community board for progress updates?
End of a weekend of rest! Time for a little post challenge introspection.
To start with, I've released a post-challenge update version to fix one low impact UI bug, and one relatively high impact crash in the AI. Overall a pretty good outcome for stability to have just one known crash after 3-4 days of release :D
For atmosphere and style I think I nailed it - It's been a while since I've done this much pixel work, and I created loads of new terrain types for the sci-fi theme which I haven't done since 2017! There was a point where the gray on gray color scheme everything started looking "muddy" and confusing, especially once I started adding more ground stuff. Navigating rooms started being a bit difficult so I spent a few hours darkening non-passable terrain so at-a-glance the user can see where they can walk without having to visually identify each feature. For example, I went from this to this -
The effect is subtle (note, the walls, boxes and shelves), but makes faster play much easier.
On the downside, I don't think I did survivors very well. The game already has a bit of back-tracking due to the pipes and exploding pods, having to ferry survivors around is another annoyance on top. I had an idea after the submission period to add a keybinding to "send-home" so at least you can send them off and not have to worry. Alternatively they could be hardier to make keeping them on a better option, but they're kinda stupid around explosions...
Even though the pipes contributed to backtracking, it wasn't as bad - I liked them. They introduce hard decisions about completing exploration, it means not all ships can be completed unless you're willing to pay the price in health. I know some players won't like this, but knowing when to call it is an extremely roguelike skill.
As far as longer term improvements in my approach, I learned a lot from watching streams last year (and look forward to doing so again this year), and I was able to implement some simple straight forward improvements to fix troubles they were having...
First off, I found people having issues with difficulty - this is no surprise for a traditional roguelike in modern times, and with my games in particular (I'm pretty good at roguelikes myself so can't really match difficulty to my own skill). So, I supplied normal and easy new game versions, however no-one I saw play would ever take the easy game, even if they were dying over and over on normal - I think likely some form of gamer pride. This year's fix for this was to rebrand easy to normal, and normal to hard - pride issues fixed! The game is probably still too hard overall but at least people should take the easier route this year.
Next was keybindings - last year, despite having "Help" as a menu item, forcibly showing them the help screen on first game load, adding a message to "Press F1 for help", some people still ended up mashing the keyboard in confusion. This year, I repeat the "Press F1 for help" message every time an unbound key is pressed, there's no way to escape assistance now! In addition to that, keybindings are tricky in general. Some users obviously have less traditional RL experience and couldn't handle the numpad, insisting on WASD. I can't imagine how anyone would be comfortable with those wonky keys for diagonal movements, but each to their own - This year users get to change movement bindings right out of the gate (last year I made them available in a post-challenge update).
And I guess that's kind it!
I haven't seen my game on stream yet, but it's loaded up with Tiger J, hopefully to be run through on Wednesday 5.30 EST ;) See you there!
End of day 7 - For real!
Welcome employee 22195, you are on time for your shift!
Your job today is to clear derelict space crafts, so they can be stripped for metal later...
Payments are made for eliminating threats, rescuing survivors, collecting scrap, and retrieving the black box at the rear of each craft.
Stay safe!
Check it out - https://numeron.itch.io/mercury-salvage
End of day 6!
I have all the proc gen complete, except for a bit of extra work to randomly scatter damage, gibs and bones about. Here is the above scout ship with rooms full of neato stuff:
Here is how one looks from the ground -
It's not just these small scout ships either, I have 5 types including transport, science, other salvage ships, and a super secret final type you'll have to play to find out ;) Each type is larger than the previous. Tomorrow will be adding in enemies and balancing things.
End of day 5!
I have basic ship layouts working, with a head, body and tail sections (denoted by the markers on the left). The body below is just BSP Node rooms, but I have some other stuff half made that should be complete mid-tomorrow. Most importantly, there is logic for door placement and windows.
It should be reasonably quick from here to start stuffing rooms with features and stuff so they don't look empty (an unfortunately requirement of non-ascii layouts), and then move onto items and enemies. For that I can at least partially rely on existing stuff from previous years but it's always best to keep it fresh and add more in.... I feel like I'm falling behind the deadline though, so I really need to pick up the pace. I guess there's always the final night all-nighter as a last resort...
End of day 4!
FINALLY have the hud in a form that I'm happy with, and also got pretty much all the game structure done, including win/death conditions and screens, some story stuff, and a final boss fight including some super special scripted attacks, like this AOE that gets larger every turn:
I also got a bunch of scifi tiles ready, thanks to a new purchase on the itch store - there are so many fantasy tiles it's crazy, but sci-fi is severely under represented.
Anyway, tomorrow will be derelict spaceship building, with maybe some content (enemies, items). It's hump day and I'm kind of nervous about time, but at least the remaining tasks are elastic, so I can work more or less on them depending on how I go. I have the week off work so there's plenty of time every day to focus on just this ;)
End of day 3!
I kinda got the feeling that I didn't have a consistent color scheme for the Mercury Salvage company, like I tend to do for factions in games I make, so I ended up wasting a bunch of time recoloring a lot of stuff green and yellow to suit a more overall gray/cyan scheme. I also got a start on the in-game HUD, which still needs plenty of work and I'm still not happy with... overall I don't feel like I accomplished a lot today. Best thing would be the oxygen pipes which now retract sensibly when backing into them, and also allow for detaching so your oxygen tank takes over -
Tomorrow I really need to close all this stuff off, because I need to start on proc gen spaceships - that random generation work being something that I know takes a lot of time, and that I traditionally loathe...
End of day 2!
Today I implemented spawning and despawning ships (which are currently just floor-only platforms) and simple air pipes for the player out in the field. I also worked a lot on the computer, the code for which is turning into a huge mess. Working on the bones of past 7drls is good and bad all at once, because while I have a lot of stuff I don't really need to do, I can be quite constrained by other things. I plan to add more shop stuff later in the week, so hopefully it doesn't slow me down further. At least it wasn't too hard to link in enemy death, and item tracking to the current ship stats though, so that the computer can keep track of you progress. It was also quite easy adding a stage to the friendly AI state machine to run to the door once they're on the dock to be rescued.
End of day 1!
I have a decent looking main menu screen (though probably need some weathering/damage on the spaceship):
And I have an ok-ish looking dock area and computer that the player can use to spawn in ships, dispose of salvage, etc. I realized too late that I have far fewer sci-fi tiles than I do fantasy so I spent too long today on pixel work and not enough on programming... Also the UI is a mess from the garbage left over from previous 7drls. I can't let myself get bogged down with polish work this early though, or I may fall behind making an actual.. you know... game.
The shop pops open a window with menu options which currently do nothing. Tomorrow I hope to fix that and start spawning in empty-boxes as spaceship stand-ins. Proc gen can come later in the week, but would be good to get salvageable junk items, and maybe wall destruction in too.