Day 7 Progress

When I started out working on my last day of the challenge, I knew I needed to put a lot of small polish into the game. I spent a couple hours putting in music and sound effects into the game. I browsed OpenGameArt on and off for a few days to pick music I was okay with, and I used SFXr to quickly generate some useful sound effects for the project.

After handling sound, I got to work implementing the title screen image I had doodled a couple days before. I wanted to go for a cutesy/childlike quality, like the protagonist was scribbling her and her dog on the cave walls. (I’m kind of worried it ended up looking too low-quality though.) I also wrote up a few quick tips for the help screen, and wrote down credits for all the assets I used.

The last major feature I needed to implement was actually putting in the win condition for the game. I rewrote the small intro prompt to make it clearer to the player what their goal was, and I made it so the random dungeon generator could actually track the level of the dungeon you were on and change its properties accordingly. (Although this feature never really was used.)

Once you reached the 5th level of the caves, the Crimson Ore would generate in place of the downwards stairs on that level. I added a small indicator to the corner of the screen, and then made it so the functions of up and down staircases were reversed once you were holding the ore. Then, all I needed to do was make the winning prompt display once you tried to climb back up on the 1st level.

The only thing left after that was some final touches. I added in 4 more enemy types, made it so the enemies and items that would spawn on the current floor were randomized, and then made it so enemies stats would all scale with the current dungeon level.

The first new enemy type was this Cave Spider, featuring a paralyzing bite.

Next, we had this near harmless little Mole.

Watch out for Screechers, they can draw other enemies to your position.

Finally, we have this little slime here that leaves a damaging trail wherever it walks.

I only had a few hours left before my submission time, but luckily I still had enough time to implement a basic action menu for the dog.

I only had time to play through the game a couple of times before I could submit, so sadly a few bugs slipped through. It was playable from start to finish, though! So, I count it as a success.

Post-Mortem

When I first decided to do the 7DRL challenge, I had come up with a couple of concepts I wanted to try playing around with. I fooled around with the idea of some sort of sci-fi roguelike, a roguelike where your character could evolve and grow like a digimon/tamagotchi, and a roguelike featuring a dice building system for combat and items.

I had actually decided to go with the dice-builder idea at first, and I went pretty hard into planning it. I had planned out this entire complex system about how each type of item would be represented and used, and I had figured out tons of mechanics and story concepts on paper. I even drew up these little mock up dice sprites because I knew I wanted to have a dice rolling animation on screen each time one was used.

I had never written a roguelike before, so I went hard into studying how different parts of them worked on RogueBasin. I knew before the challenge started I wanted to write a random dungeon generator and menu system, since those were two things that were new to me. I’m glad I did that, because both of those combined took me about 2 weeks just to get working.

As I got more into planning for this project, though, I started to realize just how large in scope it was becoming. There was absolutely no way I would be able to finish it with the 7 days I had available, as much as I tried to convince myself and pre-plan things beforehand. I decided to change concepts a couple of days before I started the challenge in earnest. I had been thinking up an interesting method(For me, at least) to have a pet/summon follow your character when I was coming up with magic ideas for my dice builder. My first thought was to make a game about having a pet, which made me think of A Boy and his Dog. I though A Girl and her Dog sounded better, and then I changed the title idea a little bit because of how generic it sounded.

This new project was a lot smaller in scope, but it was ultimately still just a little too much for me to get done during a full 40 hour work week. Most of the mechanics I wanted were in the game, but there were quite a few I had to remove just to get things in a somewhat complete state in time:

• I wanted the dog to have the ability to Sniff as an action, revealing scent trails in the darkness that would reveal where enemies and crystals were. This wouldn’t have been hard to implement, but I just didn’t have the couple of hours needed to make it work.
• The dungeon generator has the ability to easily generate secret rooms/caverns. I wanted it to be possible for the player to mine these secret walls to break them open and find crystals within, but ultimately I had to just completely disable the ability for the dungeon generator to make secret rooms at all. I just didn’t have time to make the walls breakable, and without the sniffing mechanic there wouldn’t be away to find these rooms at all.
• I had planned out 15 different items with unique effects, but I only had time to implement the first 4 into the game. (Really only 3, considering the rock does literally nothing useful.) Half of these items were going to have passive effects, but I had no time to even think of putting that system in. The Crimson Ore being drawn in the top left corner is a remnant of this, where passives were all going to be drawn up there spelunky style.

-The entire 2nd half of the game had to be cut. Caves were going to generated at a larger size from the 6th floor onwards, and new variants of enemies would being to appear. I ended up having to cut most of these, mainly just because they wouldn’t have had a place with only 5 floors of the cave available. I’m really sad I wasn’t able to use the Spirit enemy in the bottom left corner. They would’ve been invisible while playing as the girl, and you were only going to be able to see them when the dog was the active character. (I also really, really wanted to put the Mole King in. He deserved better than this.)

-Speaking of enemies, most enemy AI was drastically simplified compared to what I wanted each enemy to do.

I had to put in a lot of work to get this game done on within 168 hours. I pulled late nights, brought my computer with me to work on it during breaks at my night job, and constantly was in a state of mental crunch. Was it worth it? I’d say yes, but if I do the 7DRL challenge again I’m going to have to remember to scope down ever less than what I did for this project. I wish I could have put in some of the features I cut near the end, but I’m happy I was able to make what I made. I can’t push myself this hard too often, it isn’t good for my mental health at all. I had to spend a week relaxing just to bring myself to finish writing this post mortem.

I made a complete game featuring a start/ending, decent pixel art, slightly complex mechanics, and audio in just 7 days. It’s not the worlds biggest or most complex game, but it’s mine and it’s complete. I’m going to take what I learned from making this and apply it to my next projects.