Inspired by a throwaway line in one of my favorite sci-fi books. I was going to go with a wholly different game plan, but then I reread that book, read a neat line commenting on an alien species that doesn't consider gold a valuable substance at all, and thought "That would be a cool roguelike to make someday. Steal gold from an alien species who think it's nothing special and have massive stockpiles of it. Hey, actually it's like one week before the 7DRL..."
I wanted to do a more "classic-rogue" style game this time around, i.e. one where score was a focus, rather than achieving objectives. So the premise of the game is that you're trying to pay off your debts by earning (or rather, "earning") space-buxx, and that gives me a nice simple score mechanism to work with-- your score is just how much cash value of stuff you've collected, and just collecting the items isn't good enough, you have to stow them in the cargo hold for maximum value. It's a little too easy to "win" at this point, and needs some numerical tweaking that I didn't really have time for because I was fixing bugs right down to the wire.
The intention was always that you could keep playing after "winning" the game, in order to amass more and more cash, and strive for the high score. To that purpose, I implemented a little microservice for recording high scores, and was planning to put together a webpage to display the high scores. But I discovered that for technical reasons around publishing on itch.io, the version running on itch.io can't send your scores to my service (your browser forbids it for security reasons). So instead, to make sure I have something playable and winnable for the 7DRL, I currently have the game end in "victory" when you have enough money to pay off your debts and have escaped to the safety of deep space. If I can figure out in the near future how to get the score submission working from inside itch.io, I'll be sneaking that in as an update.
There are a few oddities in the map system I can't quite track down yet, but aside from that I'm pretty happy with the result. There's definitely some enhancements I want to make to the game going forward (more level generator types, number balancing, more ships for you to play with, &c), but I'll be leaving the 7drl version as-is aside from bug fixes-- and I'll probably run the updated versions off my own website instead of here on itch.io, anyway, so that they can talk to the highscore service.