Dying is generally a pretty large part of playing roguelikes and I would like to experiment with taking that one step further and making it the main goal and core concept. My idea is to make a pretty traditional roguelike where you work your way down through a dungeon, retrieve some MacGuffin, and then climb back out again. The "twist" being that every player death is tracked in something resembling your typical achievement/trophy system. Punched by a troll, Fell down a pit, Starved to death, Drowned, etc. Most, if not all, of these (somewhat dubious) "achievements" will be hidden from the start and will need to be discovered by the player. Hopefully this will serve to both ease the pain of screwing up a run and also to encourage exploration of the mechanics. My intention currently is not to let these achievements have any actual effect on the gameplay in future runs. I'm picturing something like the journal in Spelunky that tracks different ways of dying instead of monsters and items.
I'm obviously starting a few days late, and this being my first ever game jam, I'm trying to be very wary of scope creep. I already have more specific ideas than what can reasonable be accomplished in the remaining time but I do also have a pretty rough foundation of a sort of general roguelike engine thingy which I've been tinkering with so I'm not starting completely from scratch. It's really only a subset of what something like libtcod would provide anyway so I don't feel to bad about using my pre-existing work. We'll see where I end up I guess!
