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Horde Survivors

A topic by PTrefall created Mar 11, 2022 Views: 105
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I just sent in my entry to the 7DRL, declaring my success! There's always things that could be improved upon, but all in all I'm quite happy with the result. It's a take on Vampire Survivors but with a turn-based twist.

https://ptrefall.itch.io/horde-survivors

From day 1 I focused hard on the core mechanics and wanted to nail turn based movement, while supporting physics based movement, and this was a challenge that required a few iterations to somewhat get right (there's still room for improvement).

By Day 3 I had already run through probably 5 rewrites of the movement system, and it still wasn't very pleasant. But I also had focused on item pickups, XP and hoard spawning, though everything was still very crude.


By Day 6 I had the full game loop implemented with turn and death count, main menu, simple character selection, level ups and had put in some fun traps on the level that could have potential to be part of the meta to win the game. I had finally found an approach to the movement system that was "passable", and though it saw some minor tweaks the last day, it was pretty much set.


And finally the last day I spent making sure the game was winnable, ensured that waves of monsters continued to spawn after the boss did, added a super boss that makes you really want to kill the boss as soon as possible, etc. Just all in all tweaked the look and feel and tuned the balance of the game (and added two more characters to the character selection).

But all in all, I must say that since I started doing 7DRLs back in 2013 with Han Yolo and the Mysterious Planet, this has by far been the best experience I've had in terms to nailing down the gameplay early and focusing my time on the right things, so that I actually had time for polish at the end. Usually I end up throwing 80% of the planned features on the bonfire!