Tag Archives: 7DRL

Auto RL – 7DRL Day 3.5

So I’m halfway through the week and making okay progress on my Auto RL.  In the last 3-plus days I’ve replaced the fantasy graphics from last year’s RL, ripped out all the sword-swinging and put in a vehicle system with multiple mounted weapons and variable actions per turn based on your vehicle’s speed.  Forward and back accelerate your vehicle and left and right will turn and advance…  but I wanted to keep the feel of “one result per action” of typical Roguelikes.

So, if the player gets, say, 5 actions per turn (100 MPH), they have to choose each action whether they turn, shoot (which forces them to move straight that turn), change speed or wait (which will also result in moving forward).  However, since each weapon has a fixed-duration cooldown, you have to switch to weapons on different sides of the vehicle if you want to attack multiple times a turn.  Why exactly do you get more attacks when you’re driving at higher speeds…?  Adrenaline!

I had to start doing some cutting if I want to be done Sunday morning.  I don’t think I can do getting out of the car or vehicular enemies and my world generation quality may take a hit, but I know now that I’ve got a lot of work to do on UI and selling the movement of the car.  My major improvement will be to hook up the “Grip” system, which will force players to balance speed with control and allow for skids.  I’m excited so far!

Auto RL – 7DRL Day 1

This year is my second 7DRL, and this time I wanted to push some systems I’ve been tossing around in my head for years.  The plan is to get the player driving an armored car through a post-apocalyptic wasteland, battling bandits and 7DRL2016_Day1salvaging gear while hunting down bounty contracts.  I chose to strip down last year’s entry Huge and use it as a starting point, focusing on significant core mechanical improvements that will hopefully set it apart from that entry.

Day 1 was a busy one, ripping out the fantasy graphics and putting in sci-fi themed ones from Oryx and other sources.  I added facing and vehicle functionality to my entity system, with a variable turn-length based on speed.  I also roughed in an ugly HUD with the various systems I wanted to track. Unity makes a lot of the early stuff fairly simple, but now I actually have to make this stuff work and hopefully fun!

7DRL Epilogue: Herp Derp

Huge High QualSo it turns out that the Web Build I’ve had out for the last couple weeks of Huge was actually set to Unity’s default low quality, which meant that none of the bump-mapped sprites I labored on over the 7DRL week were lighting the way I saw them in the editor…  This bugged me enough that I put out a new build.  I also upgraded from Unity 4.6 to Unity 5 (although there isn’t a difference between the results) and I wrapped a quick five-cent title screen around the experience (using an oh-so-simple stub scene in Unity) so that the player can die and respawn gracefully rather than the ghetto reload I required before.

The extra work was an hour or two, but just in case it bothers the 7DRL people, I’ll leave the original version playable as well.

7DRL: Success!

HugeComplete2
Click here to play HUGE

I wasn’t sure I was going to make it when I went to bed last night without a functioning  boss fight, but this morning I got a ton of work done and managed to get it all together at the wire!  My only regret is not having a reload loop at the end…  you gotta do what you can in the time you’ve got.

7 days of frantic craft…  Click the image to check it out!

7DRL Day 6-7: The Soundening

In a marathon session last night, my friend and comrade Mark Shoemaker did me a solid by whipping up some badass audio that I’m working on hooking up in a way that will do it justice.   He even got me music for my fledgling title screen.

I got the boss wandering around properly, and am finally using sound to build his presence when he is near.  Sound hookup is ongoing, but it’s already quite a difference.  I also got the maps populating a bit better to boot.

The home stretch is here, so I’ve got to do the boss attacks and give the player the ability to turn crystals into bombs…  oh, and a win state would be nice.  Wish me luck!

7DRL Day 2 plus a couple hours

I kicked off Day 3 with a couple hours before work.  Yesterday and today I got in:

  • Improved dungeon generation
  • Breakable objects
  • Rough monster pathfinding (Doom-style, I didn’t tackle anything like A* given my 7-day time limit)
  • Monster factions and aggro (they currently love attacking each other a bit much)
  • …and Fog of War in LOS!  BAM!  (Okay, I used a library to shoehorn it in quick, don’t judge me)

Coming along well.  I still need an item system to drive gameplay, a UI to support it, and a lot more interesting world.

Huge2