I’m officially starting the 7DRL challenge as of 12:00 am EST Feb 29th, so I figured now would be a good time to write a sort of pre-mortem for the project before I start writing code.

This project is being made in Game Maker Studio 1.4. Going into the project, I’m starting off with:

• A base project I use for all of my game maker projects, that has all of the shared code I always reuse for input handling, scaling the display window and UI, handling pausing/interrupts, and camera movement.
• A basic random dungeon generator I’ve been learning how to write over the past few weeks.

• Code for a generic menu display system that I’ve written this past week, since I’ve never written one before.

• A turn handling system stolen from an old, unfinished first person roguelike attempt.

• About weeks worth of design ideas and hastily scribbled notepad concept art.

My original plan was to make a roguelike focusing on a dice building mechanic, but as I was planning things it was clear the scope was just too large for me to finish within a week. I would’ve had to pre-make so many assets for the concept that I felt it would be against the spirit of the jam to keep going on with it.

This project should hopefully be a lot smaller in scope and easier for me to actually finish. My last jam attempt was My First Game Jam Winter 2020, and I was barely able to submit anything, let alone a complete project! Here’s hoping this attempt goes more smoothly.