7DRL - Flagging

Having some nasty kidney problems this week, which combined with work are mostly killing progress. I have menus and an @ symbol moving around a map, and I have 3 more days. Not looking promising.

7 Day Roguelike Challenge Entry

So. I've decided to take the plunge and enter the 7DRL this year. My entry is going to be called "Chosen".

I've been very vaguely playing with a command-line based Exalted combat simulator for a while now, so I've decided I'm going to take advantage of 7DRL to turn it into a Roguelike. It'll mean moving away from a lot of the Exalted systems, and obviously because of the limitations of this codejam I'll not be able to implement some of the really cool bits of Exalted such as mass combat, social combat, or the newly released Creation-Ruling Mandate rules.

Since I will be working and/or looking after the little madam for much of this week, I'll need to ensure the feature list is as small as possible. This is going to take Some Planning.

The Unconquered Plan

So, I need to decide what to focus on. First things first, I need an engine (since I won't have time to roll my own), and since I've been working in C# quite a bit recently and what little existing Exalted code will be usable is all in C#, I'm going to use the libtcod .NET wrapper. I should be able to get to "something moving around in a dungeon" nice and quickly with that.

Next up, priority features:

• Simple chargen - pick a Caste and use a standard starting loadout.
• No overland. Pick from a list of generated quests.
• Each quest takes you to a different dungeon.
• Populate dungeons with Exalted monsters.
• Implement combat vaguely based upon Exalted tick rules.
• Cursor or numpad based movement, bump-to-attack.
• GUI needs to include obvious visuals for Essence pools and Health Levels.
• Quick-key selection for attack/defence powers.
• Include a selection of 4-5 attack/defence powers for each Caste.

Non-priority tasks:

• Destructible scenery. Everything can be smashed to smithereens. I may in fact have "smithereens" as an item type.
• The Chosen of the Sun give off sunlight when they use their powers. The LOS system in libtcod is perfect for this, and it'd be a nice change from light source handling in most RLs.
• I'm thinking modifier keys for alternate modes rather than as shortcuts for running etc. Especially for attacking. Martial Arts moves might require quite a few modifier keys.
• Use lower case for all commands. Upper case is special - Shift+anything means "use my Excellency to do that if I have one." (In non-Exalted terms, "Do it awesomely using magic".)
• XP award per quest (and maybe other situations). Allow levelling up between quests.

Further info forthcoming shortly, this is just to give an indication of what I want to do. Visually I'm thinking very crude, probably ASCII in fact, unless I have plenty of time.

Long Delay

Apologies everyone. Post GDC, everything went rather crazy and I eventually quit MCG and games dev around October. Burnout sucks. I've been gradually returning to strength during the intervening months and am currently doing non-game-related development to bring in the pennies.

So, development has been mainly stalled. If anything changes, I'll let y'all know.