You can play the game at http://refractivegames.com/7drl/
Postmortem
It was an extremely ambitious plan, like I said at the start and as can be seen from the design spec. Many of the features got axed. The one I'm most sad about was the hacking to take over other robots aspect. And also sneaking using the Transponder Spoofer. But the result is a minimal complete game and has potential for a good base for future improvements which I'm probably going to be doing after this jam.
What went right?
I'm pretty happy with the codebase. It has some ugly things (mainly how the player stuff is not encapsulated at all, input and rendering related code is all over the place, but for the most part how the robots are constructed in the code I'm quite happy with. Each entity contains a collection of modules which determine how it works. I didn't have time to make any modules beyond the absolute necessities (powerplant, chassis, brain, locomotion and weapon), but I can easily start adding more to that list now that all the code framework is in place.
Another thing that went right was the graphics. I'm very happy with how the 360 degree view looks and works for the player. I feel it's quite intuitive to use after a short adjustment period, for moving around anyway. Otherwise there is a lot of clunkyness in the interface due to time crunch...
Which leads us to...
What went wrong?
I spent way too much time on the rendering code. About 4 days was just getting the stuff on the screen, plus some more here and there. Plus because it is a free space game as opposed to strictly grid game, I had to implement collision physics which didn't take too long, but still was something that took time. Also spent time working on features that never made it to the final product, like the moving doors and destructible terrain. So effectively that time was completely wasted for this jam. (But it's there for the future now.)
But the whole carrying idea of the game is the unorthodox viewpoint, everything else follows from that. So it's kinda, yeah I had to do a lot of that work, but I could have just left it at plain walls, instead of the fancy indented walls and tiles. That would have cut the graphics engine work in about half and left me a lot more time to make a more nuanced and balanced and deeper gameplay.
So, the big failure was time management. An nothing illustrates that more than the fact that it wasn't until 30 minutes before deadline that robots shot back at you, 20 minutes before deadline that I had a lose condition and 10 minutes before deadline I had win condition. So it came literally right down to the wire whether this was a game at all and thus whether this was a success or failure.
I intentionally overspec'd the scope because I wanted to be ambitious, but I should have prioritized better. Like there is no level generation at all, the level is just each block as 33% chance of having a random tile placed on it or not. This was the bare minimum I needed for the testing and, well, never had time to make it better. (I did however come up with clever abuse of the A* pathfinding algorithm to make sure that the level is beatable so that no robot is spawned in an area that is inaccessible. Since killing all robots is the win condition.)
Also, technically this is also what went wrong: the choice of language. I picked Javascript and HTML5 using P5.js library because I wanted to learn these techs. Some things were very painful to do and took a lot longer because of that. Plus I know there's a lot of incompatibilities due to the approach I picked at start. I can fix that, but it requires redoing a lot of code, so couldn't do that during the challenge. So right now the game is Chrome only (though some people have had good results with Firefox on Linux), and even then on some machines the graphics are broken due to them doing pixel sampling differently (because of course they do... what isn't inconsistent between browsers...) But one of my goals was to learn these techs and I did learn, a lot. So teachnically bad decision for perspective of getting the game finished, but one that I had other reasons to make.
The last day
Hoo boy was the last day hectic. I came to it with an engine and the framework code, but was completely lacking gameplay. So during the final day I implemented weapons, made weapons shoot, made droids take damage, made droids have personalized behaviours (combat droids patrol, sentries guard, messengers and service droids deliver messages and work, and roomba cleans), made the combat droids able to (mostly) intelligently hunt for the player once they see you, and of course victory and lose conditions.
If there had been even just 20 minutes more I would have added a self-repair module for the player which I always wanted to add to make sure that the player won't be permanently crippled if, say, their hover module or power source gets blown up. In other words, make the player heal. So right now you can end up in a almost certain death and almost certainly impossible to win situation where you're just stuck in place. Not good for gameplay. Alas. Didn't have those 20 minutes.
Also didn't have time to make the neutral droids (yellow) start attacking as well after you shoot at them and they turn hostile (red). They are armed, just that their brains have no behaviour defined for attacking. Only now I realized that I could have just replaced their brains with the combat brain in the event they become hostile. Oh well.
From the very limited playtesting I manged to do before deadline and testing I've done after, I do feel that there is a kernel of a good game in here, so I'm gonna keep working on this in the coming weeks. And hopefully I manage to fix my Itch.io page, so you can play it here as well, not just on my own server.
Final credits and thanks
Big thanks goes to Lauren McCarthy and the P5.js community for making the P5.js library. Brian Grinstead (with contributions from Marijn Haverbeke) for the A* pathfinding library. And possibly most importantly to David Griswold for making P5.js work with MSVC Intellisense and typescript type hinting. Without that, I'm certain this project would have been complete failure (because it would have taken me a lot longer to code anything and keep everything consistent).