*I don't know if we're expected to do these or not, but I enjoy reading what other people have for inspirations and what choices they make.  So,  I'm going to do one, in hopes others will join me.

Day One:

Since the theme of the jam is "combinations",  I think I have a pretty good idea what I want to do with it.  I'm currently planning to make a math-based roguelike.  The goal is to make it easier than the average roguelike.   I want children to be able to play it as an "edutainment" game, not unlike the old Number Muncher game for the Apple IIe.

I don't want to cover everything about it yet, but that's the basic premise.

Introspecion & Retrospection:

I've thought a lot about what I did wrong during the last game jam (where I made Sim-You-Later), and I've come to three major conclusions:

1. I tried to do too many things I'd never done before.  Since I still don't have a lot of experience, it's really easy to do that by mistake.
2. I coded things from the beginning of the game to the end, rather than coding the harder parts first and then attaching things like menus to them afterwards
3. I was self-conscious about my code, and tried to make it look nicer.  In doing so I wound up breaking several things, which probably would have been fine had I just left my code where it was.

So, to rectify that, this time I'm working from a "recipe" of sorts - there are a few good roguelike tutorials for python users, which I'm  following along for a lot of the boilerplate stuff (mostly getting the rendering engine up).   This will assist with parts 1 & 2, because I'll be working from a tested blueprint to help me figure out what the key features are, and it'll help me to keep in scale.

Progress so far:

At the end of the first day, I have a player moving around and the map generation is close to how I want it.  I'm still going to have to play around with it to see if I can get something I like a little more, but I have a map that WORKS, so for now I'm going to move on.  

My goal is to get the core of the game done by the 9th.  Then if I can get some people to test it on the 10th, I'll have 3 days to do things like debug and tinker with the map & AI to make sure it's what I want.  I still may not be able to get it perfect.  (I am, after all, still new to this), but I'd rather have a finish project than perfection in half of an unfinished game.

If people want to see the WIP code, they can find it at: https://github.com/Spitball-Sessions/JamCraft2

Things are starting to come together now. 

I definitely need to think about my choice of colors a bit.  (I want the game to be color blind friendly, but also because the current color scheme is a bit garish.)

That said, I have the bones of this thing going in the right direction.  

•  I have map.
• I have an FoV.
• I have monsters.
• I can attack the monsters (though it currently doesn't do anything).

Next on the block:

• Adding 'combat' such as it is (basic addition and subtraction).
• Making monsters move maliciously.
• Adding the UI on the side - tracking the players 'level' and combat effects.

I also have something from each step that I'll probably fine-tune a bit once everything is in place:

The map still doesn't feel quite right.  I like that it's mostly open, but when monsters start moving around, that'll be a bit more of a problem.   I'd like it to have more of a cellular automata look over the current bsp style.  I'm not sure I'm good enough to figure out how to do that though.  Most of the cellular automata map algorithms I've seen are fairly complex.

The FoV colors need tweaking.  I'd also really like to add some light falloff, so that the outer square or two look darker orange.  I think that will probably mean switching from shadowcasting to raytracing, which I'm reticent to do just for that, but it's definitely something worth considering.

Monster distribution isn't right yet.  Because the game is based around adding and subtracting, the player needs a wide variety of numbers to work with.  Beyond that, I need to tinker with the pools themselves to ensure the right amount of each number is showing up.  Still, reasonably pleased with my progress thus far.