Edit: This game was a successfull completion of the 7DRL - check it out here: https://numeron.itch.io/necrofactory

Hello! My name is Numeron, and my entry for this year is:

Necro Factory will be a bit hack-n-slash, a bit of tower defence, and a bit factory building - The idea being that killing mobs drops resources that you can use to make towers, conveyor belts, constructors, and new mob spawners. For now, the idea is that you are trying to build your way up the map, which means clearing out harder monsters but access to more/new resources (like graveyards for creating skeletons), ultimately taking down a well defended city.

I'm not starting from scratch - I've been at 7DRLs for a long time now, this will be my 17th entry! I typically use the bones of my previous year's entry - ripping out stuff I don't need and building in everything new. This year will be no different, so the backing game and graphics engine of many previous years will be the same.

At midday on Saturday at my location, I will begin (about 30m!) so that's my deadline next weekend.

Best of luck to everyone!

Day 1:

Not much in the way of game progress, but I have warmed up to the code base again after not touching it for a long time. I also had to sorted out a few of bugs that popped up - last year I merged everything I thought was useful code from that 7drl back into master, but never tested or tried to use any of it so there's plenty more functionality but lots of it is half broken. I've set up the project, added the menu screen and an introductory story, set up some basic look and feels, and some of the enemies (since they talk during the intro). Anyway here's the cute vignette I made for the menu screen to help get back into the swing of 3d and make sure it all works (it didn't initially!)

Day 2:

Quite a lot of UI stuff today, with pretty much all of it out of the way. I'm not super happy with the book background but everything is operational up to and including assigning build options to the hotbar and entering/leaving construction mode. It's also prepped to send messages to the internal server to actually action, so tomorrow I'm hoping to complete constructing things, as well as operational stuff like a processor building to process bodies, and the conveyor belt functionality to move things around.

Don't mind the messy test map ;)

Day 3 (part 1):

Just wanted to quickly share this gif of an item on a build conveyor belt, which moves turn by turn as I wait. More gifs toward the end of the day!

Day 3 (part 2):

Time slipped way from me, and I really need to get to bed so no detailed update, just a few gifs and screenshots:

Round robin conveyors accept evenly from around them, to prevent locking up any lines

A storage accepting some items:

Slightly broken picker and processor GUI

Best of luck!

Day 4:

Fixed a lot of jank in yesterday's work, and added heaps of functionality - processors and storage piles and so on all work great, as well as mostly the towers. I'm still stuck against some big bugs though, one with clipping in the ui that's ruining lots of my stuff (as seen in yesterday's screenshot, how the scroll list isn't clipped to it's window), as well as missile animations being inexplicably broken, and infact causing rendring of the whole screen to screw up momentarily. Hope to get on those tomorrow - also consious of the fact that I'm half way through now... Tomorrow might hopefully do some quick wip level generation, and stuff to make me feel better about the timelines.

Anyway, have a processor (the world-graphic of which needs replacing) creating a product from inputs, and a picker pulling the prodcut out onto a conveyor:

And here's some towers in action (icons of which need some improvements also):

Day 5:

Functional buildings are all complete! So, conveyor belts carry items around, push them into storage or processors which can be configured to make shiny new items. Summoners can be created to generate undead from certain places around the world, but the summoned creatures will instantly attack them, so walls can be placed to divert them into damaging towers. And so, as you move through the map, you can gain resources by clearing out enemies and setting up new mini factories - and use them to create new armor/weapons/health potions etc to help you keep going.

Today, I'm onto world generation, which will have a few zones, but I'm trying to keep them generally small and uncluttered since player might spend some time building in each one before deciding to move on. Stressing about time as usual at this point - hopefully procgen doesn't take too long because in the past it's always been a killer, and I really want to spend more time on the gameplay this year.

Starting with some story, our hero sets off to build an army:

Day 6 (part 1)

Just a little level generation as a treat.

Day 7:

It's past midnight and I'm desparately trying to pull everything together before midday. Not really got time to share much, but thought this was a neat shot of a test play. Keep your peepers peeled in about 12 hours, because I'm sure this will be a success - just can't really take my attention away right now.

Day 7 all the way:

I have been awake working on this for ~30 hours, and I am exhausted! The game is live here :

https://numeron.itch.io/necrofactory

I'll do a post mortem post in the coming days.