I started my project today, and Day 1 went reasonably well. I have a plan for what I'd like to get through in each of the first four days, and I got everything I planned for day 1 complete. I did uncover a couple small things I'll need to add, though.

My project is "Let Them Eat Cake", a gameshow in a dark dystopian future. It's a deadly competation, but people volunteer for it for the chance to win extravagent luxuries, such as two-ply toilet paper.

I am building it off of the same engine I'm using for my main project, so there's a lot of library code for pathfinding, AI, and rendering that I'm taking advantage of. This project is a bit of a departure, though, because my main project is more of a dwarf fortress style simulation, whereas my 7drl is a combat focused dungeon crawl.

Main progress today:

* Set up the project and did all of the boilerplate work to get it building and running for my new project. I'm using godot, but most of the code is generic .NET 6.0 libraries.

* Put together some initial art for walls and characters. I'm using 3D models of ASCII characters for now, which I may swap out if there is time later in the week.

* Implemented player + monster movement. No combat yet; that'll be tomorrow.

* Implemented a first pass of dungeon generation. This was the biggest piece of work today. I've never really written something like this, so I'm starting with a BSP approach. It's decent enough for now, but I hope to have time to improve it on Monday or Tuesday.

* Added some towers to the dungeon generation. These are going to play a big part in the actual gameplay, because your goal in each floor will be to reach each of the towers and press a button to open the exit. I also like what they might bring to the gameplay, because the higher elevation gives you a much better view of the map.

This is my first 7DRL, but I'm really enjoying it so far. Hopefully I can keep my momentum up for the rest of the week.

Here's the player about to walk up a tower to get a better view

Day 2: Where things go awry...

My plan for today had two main parts. 1) adding basic combat, and 2) adding a few weapons with special effects (AoE, freeze enemy).

What got done:

•  Added health components and a death system.
• Added the ability for players to attack enemies.
• Added melee attack enemies that chase and then attack the player.
• Added range attack enemies that move to within range and then shoot the player.
• Implemented action cooldowns + a basic UI to display that actions are still pending.
• Started the work to add items on the ground to be picked up. The items are there, but they can't be picked up or used yet.
• Implemented the pause time mechanic, that pauses the game automatically whenever the player isn't doing anything.

Unfortunately, getting monster movement to work properly required making a lot of changes to my movement and AI system, because the game I originally built the engine for was more tile based. It's working pretty well now, but it definitely led to a lot of unexpected work.

So, as a result of that...

What didn't get done from my original plan for today:

• Ability to pick up and equip weapons
• Weapons with limited ammo
• Weapons with special effects
• UI for inventory

So those will have to wait until tomorrow. My original plan only extends through 4 days, so there's still room to fit it in.

Tomorrow's plan:

• Finishing up the items planned for today
• Lots of UI
• Random monster + item generation in the level
• Add buttons to the towers so the player can finish the level.

Tomorrow is when the core gameplay loop comes together.

Day 4 Update: We have gameplay!

Life got in the way on Day 3, so I didn't post a devlog, but I made some good progress. I now have a working game end-to-end.

Armed with my trusty freeze ray, ready to take on the swarm of enemies surrounding me:

It did not end well:

Undeterred, I try again and make it to the buttons I need to press to win the game show:

After three grueling floors, victory is mine!

It feels good to have somethine working start to finish.

However, it still isn't really that fun. And I don't love my art. So the next three days are going to be alla bout adding more weapons, and maybe more enemies, to add a bit of depth. 

I think I'm solidly on track to complete at this point.

I'll post some videos tomorrow that show how the not-quite-turn-based system looks. While this particular game may not end up being amazing, I think that mechanic has potential.

Today things got weird.

I decided to swap out my art for some pictures of me in different outfits. The results are... disconcerting.

I did it as a joke, but I'm kind of in love with it. It actually works well for the main game, because you generally play zoomed out too far to see the details, and the different color outlines make it easy to identify different enemy types at a glance.

I also got the last few game systems implemented:

• Stamina
• Persisting progress across levels
• UI for picking up items and Ammo
• A weapon with a poison effect.
• Added a few more enemy types

End of day 5, but it's effectively complete. However, it's still WAY too hard, and not particularly fun. So the next two days are trying to address that:

• Adding some color commentary. It won't affect the gameplay, but it's an idea I had to go along with the gameshow theme that I think might be fun to write.
• Game balance; I need to tweak things so the enemies aren't quite so brutal
• Possibly add some more ways to evade enemies. Right now, it's easy to get cornered and beaten down, but a "shove" action might help a lot. Also, right now, once an enemy sees you, it chases you forever. I think I'll make it so they lose interest when the lose LoS.

I was a bit too worn out after submitting last night, so I forgot to post a final update.  

It is finished:

https://thegoatrodeo.itch.io/let-them-eat-cake

That was a hell of a week. I'm pretty happy with how things turned out. I had two goals for this challenge:

• Actually finish a project
• Try out a hybrid turn-base/real-time system (like Superhot or Wazhack)

I think I accomplished both of them.

Highlights:

• Actually finishing a project feels great, instead of letting it become yet another abandoned project.
• I really like the feel of the automatic pausing system I have in the game. I'm definitely going to bring that to a future project and explore it more.
• I had a great time talking with people on the discord and watching everyone else's progress.
• I just started using Godot a couple weeks ago, and this was my first real project with it. I'm glad I gave it a try, because I really like a lot of things about it. I'm definitely going to stick with it, rather than switching back to Unity for future projects.

Lowlights:

• The game doesn't have nearly as much depth as I would have liked. This was partly due to me deciding to make it in 3D. Even though I used my existing engine, it wasn't built to support this type of direct player movement, so I ended up spending about a full day just on making collision detection and pathfinding work right. This cost me time that I would have rather spent adding more weapons and enemies.
• I spent the last day chasing down crashing bugs. Once I built a retail build on the last day, I started encountering a lot of new crashes. These ended up being mostly due to me not understanding which operations are thread safe in Godot. I was able to fix it, but it was a bit of a scramble at the end to get things stable.

This was my first 7DRL, but I'm absolutely planning on doing it again next year. I'm also looking forward to spending the next week trying out other submissions.