Unfortunately, my project has ended up incomplete. It was a decent exercise at least, and enough to indicate I could do it in the future, but it turns out I didn't plan well enough.
I'm still glad I participated. It helped shake off some of my analysis paralysis problems partially. I won't be posting the incomplete project though, because I might want to save the idea for a later project and because people's time is better spent on projects that are more complete. I don't want to take away time from more worthy entrants. I also may reuse the idea. I messed up this time, so oh well. I'll be more careful in the future.
Several problems account for most of the reason why my project got derailed:
(1) I was trying to do physics-based pathfinding. I came to the 7DRL with a script for part of my physics stuff already partially done, thinking I wouldn't need to do much more to make it work for my plans, but I was quite wrong. Physics-based pathing is hard, and I even knew that from past experience doing it, but I still miscalculated regardless. I ended up spending most of my work just trying to get the physics based movement for the AI to work and it still didn't end up looking acceptable even despite sinking most of my time in it.
(2) For the past few years I've suffered from terrible insomnia and analysis paralysis problems and have had a mental block on game dev that has been frustrating me a lot. For 3 of the 7 days I was so tired from poor sleep that I was already struggling not to fall asleep by 1:00pm in the day. These 3 days ended up with me accomplishing almost nothing on them. I need to take my health more seriously going forward...
(3) I was also struggling with some negative feelings from working in a toxic AAA game dev environment years ago that I've had a really hard time overcoming in recent years. Before that time, I used to be much more free flowing and productive in game dev work, but since then I've struggled with freezing up and having negative associations with game dev that make it harder for me to focus sometimes. Me joining this event was partly just because I love roguelikes so much and partly because I wanted to try to overcome my mental blocks on game dev work. I've at least made partial progress in that respect, so I'll call that a win overall.
Oh, and I did indeed get a simple random map generator working, and also had some potentially interesting ideas I wanted to try with it, but ended up not having time to flesh it out and polish it up to anything near what I had in mind. I also didn't have time for the game mechanics either. Physics ate up all my time.
I'm going to not mention the specific of my game design idea more than I already have, since I may use it again in the future (with better preparation).
I apologize for the incomplete project.
Also, in hindsight I should have posted my announcement elsewhere than in this general discussion section, but I wasn't sure what I wanted to call the project yet so I didn't want to put it with the others until then.
Anyway though, it was a good exercise, even if incomplete.
Congratulations to all the other participants for their projects! I hope everyone had a good time and had better planning than me. This community is always really great at producing some interesting things, and I've always been happy to have found the community.
Next thing in my plans: I'm going to stop procrastinating about my insomnia problems, since it clearly is damaging my productivity too much.
Thanks for reading. Have a great weekend and upcoming week everyone.