Day 7 (Sunday)
I am considering this a failed game. It is "complete" in the sense that you can go through the actions necessary to win (i.e., you can find the crown and bring it out). However, all of the intermediary pieces are not finished enough to my liking.
For example, I was only able to get the initial traps that I created working (spawning monkeys, rolling boulders, and falling floors). Yesterday when I changed the method for generating maps, those traps broke. I have been unable to fix them. So, the dungeon is generated with many inoperable traps.
That leaves combat. Melee combat works. The AI isn't particularly interesting, but what bothers me is that I never got around to adding ranged combat. In other words, you only wander around a mostly empty dungeon bumping into enemies that are blindly running towards you. I don't find that particularly interesting, and it's not especially innovative for a roguelike.
The parts that I wanted to experiment with I was unable to finish: the traps, and the item management. In particular, I wanted to see how the game could work with multiple characters going in and out of the dungeon, and needing to manage their food supply and such. Since that required a dungeon to explore, I thought I could use the traps to make it more interesting. The item management is complete, in that you can have multiple characters and switch between them to enter into the dungeon... the mostly empty dungeon.
As such, I'm bowing out. There is enough of a game here that I'm considering continuing it as a separate project (especially since I never figured out how to make a game page for it on itch.io anyway), but not enough that it feels like a complete game and certainly not innovative when it comes to roguelikes.
I thought this was a good run. In total, I spent about 48 hours on the game (definitely long enough for this contest) but by day 3 was really tired every day thereafter. I liked that the game was effectively complete halfway through and I was able to work on the intermediary content in the remaining days. I liked that I lost practically no time to fiddly administrative and management stuff, and testing JavaScript in the browser was really fast. This went far smoother than my attempts in C++ and even Java.
However, two things slowed me down. First, I wasted a lot of time on bugs related on the underlying structure. At least 6 hours were lost to just getting proper input, and I think around 7 to properly drawing to the screen, despite using a toolkit to draw and JavaScript for input (which is pretty simple as far as programming languages go). These were across multiple days (the input bug happened on 4 days!), so I could still progress, but in terms of the total time available it was far too costly. The prior code that I used as my starting point got me going quickly, but broke soon after I tried to extend it. I'll either turn this game into a library for me to use in other games, or look for another engine for next time.
The second thing was the main topic of the game. The part I wanted to experiment with for a roguelike required too much additional content. The scope was too big, but I couldn't think of any other way to do with. I had other ideas for a game at the start of the jam, but none of them seemed experimental enough or required a significantly smaller scope. Again, I wanted to experiment with something for this jam, so my ideas had to fit that desire. Unfortunately it didn't pan out, but there's always other years. Besides, there's already plenty of other entries to try out this year!