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Well it's over, and that was a bit rough!

I was planning to update this devlog with some cool cellular automata, but with all cellular automata there's a bit of chaos, and I couldn't get it to where I wanted within the 7 days. The main issue was finding that balance between too chaotic and too stable: the B3/S23 ruleset. I do have some ideas for making it work, but they will take some experimentation. Perhaps next year!

So Friday night I made the decision to abandon the idea and scramble to make something with the last couple of days. Thankfully, I did have a pretty cool runner up idea, and so I went with that. I'm quite happy with the result! Here is my 2DRL, "Wall Crawl", an endless flow mining roguelike.

The idea is pretty simple: mine and survive. You are stuck with a bunch of crawlers that rebuild walls that can entomb you. You can seek out and expose the crawlers to collect them, or just avoid them. There's a rune field for activating spells, which can speed up mining and movement.

Play it here: https://gruebite.itch.io/wall-crawl and lemme know what you think!

Congrats everyone! Excited to see what everyone came up with.

Yo!

I'm gruebite and this year I'll be making Garden Spell. A relaxing automata garden Roguelike. This is a bit experimental, but I'm excited to try it. The gameplay will consist of watching flora grow and propagate while learning spells to influence them. I have a rough picture of how it'll look, but I can't say much more until further along the iterative process. :)

I'll be building off a lot of what I've accumulated with my previous entries (Greedy Rogue, Shadow Dream). I'm starting development tomorrow evening and will post sporadic updates here!

Good luck everyone!

Thanks! Love the suggestion for pointing to the obelisks! I agree with the crystals right now. I've been thinking about ways to improve them, and also tightening the search space.

Beginning 2nd to last day and I've created the jam page and submitted as a success! Still a bunch to do and right now I've been playtesting and tuning gameplay. Also, unlike last year, I decided to add sounds and music. :) Today I'm planning to continue to playtest and add content. Tomorrow will be all polish before finishing.

For the curious, you can play it here: https://gruebite.itch.io/shadow-dream

Changes

• Demon behavior is now more dynamic and the system is pretty simple but robust I think.  Still tuning the scaling.
• Environment interactions, like jumping.
• Progen more features: paths, flora
• Spells added a couple more spells
• Music & sound effects

Gameplay Snippet

End of day 4 and I'm happy with my progress so far. I have implemented a good chunk of the core gameplay (excluding playtesting), and am at a stage where I can tweak and add things as I'm playtesting. Just gotta be careful of feature creep. :P

Gameplay

The goal of the game is to restore obelisks found across the map. They can only be restored by lumenstones, which there are three randomly strewn across the map.

The main antagonist is shadows, which grow in strength over time. They start out anywhere from harmlessly following you, to minor harassment. With enough time, the harassments will become deadly threats.

To fight shadows, you will need mana and spells, which can be found and collected around the map. Emitting a glow allows you to see shadows, but it drains mana each turn. Spells can be learned from totems.

Progress

• Character stats Life, mana, lumenstones, crystals.
• World generation Flora, lumenstones, shrines (locations), totems, and obelisks. Some more work is needed here.
• Win/loss Lumenstones can be picked up and returned, and you can die.
• Shadows Early shadow behavior and growth. Needs lots of playtesting.
• Spells Casting spells, learning spells, and forgetting spells. Also damage and mobility spells. Some spells with the same name can have varying behavior and efficiency.
• Totems Activating totems, and channeling spells.

Lazers

Hey all! This year I'm working on Shadow Dream, a survival Roguelike. The premise is you're a shaman entering a fading Dreamworld engulfed by shadows.  Your goal is to find Lumenstones and return them to where they belong.

Gameplay will revolve around light, exploring, managing mana, and achieving your goal before the shadows overwhelm you.

This is about the end of day 2 for me and I've implemented basic world generation, FOV, mana, and acquiring Lumenstones. I'm piggybacking off the style and architecture of Greedy Rogue, which I liked and worked quickly with. :)

I've completely moved over to Godot for most of my game development, so I'll be using that.  In the past I used C, Love2D, or Pico8.

Hey all.  I am a programmer and game designer.  I use Godot, but have experience in others (Unity, MonoGame, Love2D, etc).  I primarily work with 2D and enjoy working with systemic/mechanical driven games.  Looking for an artist and/or composer.  Lemme know if you're interested and good luck everyone!

Yep.  It's a small Roguelike toolkit.  It comes with a node to manage turn-based actions and animations.  If you're curious about the dungeon generation, check out the `walker.gd` script in `rlgd`.  I use a specialized random walk where I can carve arbitrary patterns and ensure connectedness by keeping track of key points: edges, open areas, tagged tiles, etc.  `systems/generator_system.gd` utilizes this in a large function, haha.

Here it is: https://github.com/gruebite/GreedyRogue

Thanks, TigerJ!  I look forward to watching. :)

Hey all.  Just under 20 hours left on the project and have set up an itch page.  There have been quite a lot of changes and polish, and still more to do, but it's in a fairly playable state I think.  Some high level changes: 

• Added level transitions and 2 more chambers to go through, each with a different layout and different enemies.
• Added 6 more artifacts and improved the existing ones.
• Added 1 more elemental.
• Added more interactions in the environment, improved the existing ones.
• Made UI and quality of life improves.  Artifacts that don't charge, don't have a charge bar.  Artifacts that don't level, don't have a level.
• Minor tweaks and balancing.

Here's the link! https://gruebite.itch.io/greedy-rogue

Approaching day 5.  I have spent a lot of time keeping systems organized by following an implement / refactor cycle.  Here are the list of changes since the last update:

• Refactored the interacting systems into a something much more extendable.
• Implemented three additional denizens of the lair, excluding the dragonlings.  There's one I'm particularly fond of.
• Improved general UI flow and consistencies.
• Added 19 unique artifacts.
• Improved feedback by adding effects to certain actions and events

Here's a brief snippet of game play using a power bracelet to remove fire by throwing a rock.

Thanks :)

Just over day 3.  A large part of day 2 was spent making the systems more robust to expand, so there wasn't too much to show.  Here's a list of changes over the past 2 days:

• Built a system of interacting components: objects on the ground trigger pitfalls, fire destroys certain materials, things can interact with others selectively like a dragon can topple a stalagmite, rocks can put out fire, etc.
• Added simple animations, mostly particles and flashing.
• Added bumping combat.
• Fleshed out dragonling AI a bit.  They sleep and breath fire, etc.
• Added simple escape/death screens and death handling.
• Began adding an artifact item system.  Can choose from random artifacts and upgrade existing ones.

Some screenshots and gifs:

Finding an artifact:

Using jumping boots to cross a lava river:

Fire and dragons:

Nearing the end of day 1 and I've made pretty good progress.  Here's a list:

• Basic dragon lair generation.  It has an open center, lava rivers, lava pools, gold piles, and rocks.
• Static and dynamic light.  Lava emits static light after generating the lair, the player and dragonlings emit dynamic light.
• Turn system.  Very basic, you move, others move.
• Basic stats.  Health and anxiety can delete you (nothing else happens).  Anxiety steadily increases, health goes down when walking over lava.
• Gold pickup.  Restores anxiety.
• Wandering dragonlings.  Right now they just emit a small amount of light and walk randomly.
• Rocks and bumping mechanics.  You can push rocks over lava to fill it in.

Here's a few screenshots:

...


Building a bridge of rocks.

Hey all.  I'm gruebite and this is my 7DRL entry: GreedyRogue (loosely inspired by the BSD game "Greed").  This year I'm going for a more traditional idea: cavern, dragons, treasure, escape.   I'll post the bigger progress updates here.  Anyway, here is the idea:

Story

You play as a Rogue looting treasure from a Dragon's Lair under a volcano. You've picked a time when the Dragon is out terrorizing the local village. Unfortunately you didn't anticipate there being Dragonlings. But you're greedy and anxious, and continue anyway.

Mechanics

Play centers around managing the Rogue's health and anxiety in a dynamic environment.  Anxiety is constantly increasing, and must be managed by collecting the limited treasure throughout the lair.  Health can be lost in traditional ways, and is difficult to recover.  The goal is to collect as much treasure as you can, and book it for the exit.

The lair itself is dark, and there will be some light play.  Lava rivers and pools provide light, as well as dragonlings, and your candle.  Objects close to light can be seen, objects farther outside the radius will be vaguely recognizable.  The lair is also dynamic:  Stalagmites you can push to kill dragonlings, or create bridges over lava;  Boulders to push;  Earthquakes creating falling hazards, closing and opening chasms.

Dragonlings will initially be asleep, but more will wake up the more treasure is collected.  Dragons move randomly, breathing fire (which melts treasure), and will pursue you if they see you.

This is a very rough mock-up of the lair:

Good luck to everyone!

Thanks!

Thanks!

Thanks!

Thanks!

Thanks, Wombat! :)

Thanks!  And yeah, unfortunately I did not have time for sound.  I guess vacuum of space? :P

Yeah.  Since some plants are larger than others, I enforced a spacing limit.  I added a section in the tips, but an in-game indication would be preferable for sure.  Thanks for bringing this up! :)

Day 2

I skipped a day 1 update since I spent a majority of it on infrastructure stuff. Since then I've added a hex grid that is populated with sprites based on contents. Oak trees, which have some code for growing procedurally, A druid that can perform contextual actions based on selections, including shape-shift (twitter link). And a bunch of custom UI code for displaying ASCII.

Here is a screenshot so far:

The project for this year is a little more ambitious, but this time I don't have work to distract me! I will be working with @jestbubbles, who will be doing sound and music. Sow is a top-down base building Roguelike where you play as a dryad growing a forest in a large hostile and arid environment.  You will defend the trees from black slimes, and ensure the trees are well watered and generally happy. As a dryad, you can transform into a pig to smell for random features and hidden objects in the desert, you will also smell for truffles under the trees you grow, which will be allies in combat and tree growing. The art style is inspired by ASCII based Roguelikes but taken into a continuous space. I drew a mock-up to get a sense of the style and I am pretty happy with it!

Good luck everyone!

Cute game. The magic system looked interesting, it's a bummer it didn't make it in!

This was fun! I Enjoyed hitting the notes! I couldn't figure out how to efficiently hit all 6 buttons, and there was no penalty for missing.

Pretty fun game. I like that the commands loop, it's interesting. It was tough to get the commands matching parts of the level.

Love the aesthetic and the music fits well! It was very satisfying to phase switch and move around. It would be cool to have an incentive to move and phase shift more. I felt like the best strategy was staying relatively still and reacting.

Love it! The mechanic is quite novel and led to some interesting choices. It was fun watching the clock to see how much time each color had, and planning where to position yourself to be the safest. The simplicity and completeness of this is fantastic, but I would have liked to more elements supporting the core loop.

Elegant game! I enjoyed it a lot. I like the idea of discovering elements of a level by changing frequency,  and it gave rise to a lot of interesting mechanics. However, I felt like the frequency search space was too large.

Cool idea, you can get familiar with the controls. But I felt like some power-ups were significantly harder to get than others.

Luckily I had someone to play with! Very chill, it would be cool if there were more ways to throw off the other player.