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7DRLs / Re: [7DRL 2023] [WIP] Loop Dungeons

« on: March 11, 2023, 08:34:01 AM »

There would be plenty to do for another 7 days, including balancing (hopefully the included difficulty options will make up a little bit for the lack of polish) and perhaps most notably we had to drop a planned feature where the player would be able to choose which rooms would be behind locked doors (player-driven content generation).

That would've been neat indeed but halfway through we realized we only had time for either that or the cool sideway battle-scene, which we ended up going with. The trinket bag was the "we have player agency at home" alternative, so players can at least be able to make some strategic decisions on how to spend their resources.

I woke up today thinking of lessons learned, as that is such an important part of formal project management. Can't say I have many in the grand scheme of things - probably becasue personally, I used the same technologies and methods I'm familiar and happy with to create a game in a genre I'm also quite familiar with ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I guess maybe that's the take-away lesson? "If you stick to your guns and are comforatble with the tools and knowledge at your disposal, you can get a lot done in a week". Hardly a ground-breaking concept in the history of 7DRL, I'd bet...

Felix joked the other day about "being able to accomplish anything with the power of friendship" when I said I had less than 15 hours to redo the entire combat system in panoramic view I guess that's a lesson of its own but I'll leave it to him to elaborate further if he feels like it.

I would happily call Loop Dungeons a success. We set up to find a balanced formula between idle games, simulation, puzzle-games and traditional roguelikes and I think we arrived somewhere interesting and unique, despite the genres being at odds. If a success means we achieved our goal, then that's a goal successfully achieved. Whether the game is good or not will be up for everyone else to decide.

Our formula may be openly derivative, sure but the game is also unique in its implementation of the concepts we borrowed from. (Hey, we have a whole sub-culture going on around an old-ass text-based game called Rogue, we wear our inspirations in our sleeves around here)!

The time-frame was pretty brutal in terms of work-load but we pulled through without any major compromises when it comes to the essential feature-set. Polish is so-so too but I guess that's what you end up with when you strive for something ambitions for a 7DRL!

Happy gaming and a nice weekend to anyone who made it through these posts. Can't wait to see what everyone else has come up with!

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7DRLs / Re: [7DRL 2023] [WIP] Loop Dungeons

« on: March 11, 2023, 08:33:24 AM »

Final update

So it's done, the game is successfully "finished" and live right now on ITch, where the 7DRL event is taking place!

Links
- Itch https://tukkek.itch.io/loop-dungeons
- My personal Discord server, which we used for team coordination (...and memes) https://discord.com/invite/5sXXcwPCSP

Here's the project overview by-the-numbers:

Content
- Around 50 procedurally-generated rings (over 500 if you include visual variations)
- Almost 20 enemy types (each with a signature ability)
- Almost 20 pieces of equipment (each with a signature ability)
- Over 10 floors per dungeon on average (players can also generate new dungeons at will during a playthrough)
- 4 starting character kits, including a randomly-generated one
- 3 visual dungeon and battle themes
- 3 magic scrolls
- 3 difficulty options
- 2 potions
- 1 main menu and 1 main game screen with 5 major panels

Development
- 200 art assets
- 50 source files
- 4 days until getting an internal alpha ready (with around 30 updates to it since then)
- 3 members on Team Loopy™ (from 3 different countries and 2 continents)
- 3 automation scripts
- 2 music tracks (3 variations total)
- 7 days
- 1 roguelike

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7DRLs / Re: [7DRL 2023] [WIP] Loop Dungeons

« on: March 10, 2023, 07:59:51 AM »

Day 6 update

They say a picture tells more than a thousand words so I'll let the battlescape, which was my sole focus for the day, speak for itself:



(Blame the forum for the choppy framerate, not me)!

I could have used another four hours in the day but it's way too late now. I wanted to finish all pending tasks and leave the final day just for playtesting and polish but apparently there is no rest for the wicked ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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7DRLs / Re: [7DRL 2023] [WIP] Loop Dungeons

« on: March 09, 2023, 07:31:34 AM »

Raglicker game jammers' Fantastic Day 5 Update!

Despite the rumors to the contrary, I have not gone insane and decent progress was made today. You can even start a new game! How exciting!



Highlights from today:

- 4 character classes
- Main menu
- End-game bosses
- New type of item: trinkets (only potions for now)
- Much-longer main music track
- Better combat pacing
- UI tweaks and quality-of-life changes
- Bugfixes. Always bugfixes.

Leather set for the Rogue:


Iron set for the Knight:


Holy set for the Paladin:


Wait but isn't there also a Guy class? Well, there surely is a Guy there. I just don't know him. He looks alright though.

With 2 days left on the schedule, this leaves time maybe for one new major feature and a final day for adding content and polish!

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7DRLs / Re: [7DRL 2023] [WIP] Loop Dungeons

« on: March 08, 2023, 07:35:56 AM »

Day 4 update

Yesterday was a rough day for 7DRLing but today made up for the lost time and then some! Here's roughly what I got done today:

- Our first playable alpha for internal testing     
- Gear: active abilities, cool-downs and upgrading
- 4 new enemy types (each with a signature ability)
- User-interface improvements in preparation for a bigger overhaul
- Auto-explore now moves to the beat of the main gameplay track
- Much more natural auto-explore behavior
- Much smarter auto-fight and many UI improvements on edge-cases
- Bleeding-edge Homer™ method for finding nice home locations for nice little monsters on the map
- Generally much-improved map generation parameters
- (Early) balance tuning, the game should actually offer and require some challenge and strategy now
- Performance optimizations when drawing the map and UI in general



Some of this would have been ideally done yesterday but... better late, right...? This should roughly put the project back on schedule and hopefully having an internal alpha working that can be updated in under a minute will also be a big benefit as we move towards the second half of the week!

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7DRLs / Re: [7DRL 2023] [WIP] mission improbable Rogue Agent

« on: March 07, 2023, 05:19:08 PM »

The idea of a detailed, simulated procedural city and world, with individual NPCs, factions... is something that has always been very interesting to me. What you are describing here is what I wished developers of games like Streets of Rogue would create as my dream game 

I've worked on designs (and some code) for both a Rimworld-style game with larger-scale simulation and also for a "MatrixRL" that would attempt to simulate an entire city block in detail, including buildings with different floors, vehicles... I've also wanted to add similar things to other projects of mine but it's always too much work to try to do - so it will be very interesting to see how you approach the design and what lessons can be learned!

I also love the name by the way good luck on your project!

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7DRLs / Re: [7DRL 2023] [WIP] Loop Dungeons

« on: March 07, 2023, 09:11:32 AM »

Not much to report today, some time was lost to non-essential tasks, some time was lost to IRL preoccupations and much time was lost to refactoring and, in particular a nasty string of bug-fixes. I do have a couple minor snapshots to show for my work though!

A simple in-game help screen showing keyboard-shortcut overlays:



And the in-game debug mode showing the auto-explore and auto-fight features, which I'll explain a bit more in detail:



(GOTTA GO FAST! The video is only 5 frames-per-second, which is why it looks so choppy in here).

As a game that can be played either in semi-idle or turn-based modes (proper balancing for each still pending), the auto-explore and auto-fight functions are essential to Loop Dungeons. The "driver" decides which goals to go for in the dungeon depending on simple factors (such as player health) while the "fighter" semi-randomly, semi-intelligently selects abilities to use during combat (bottom left).

Even now, before proper tuning, the auto functions cannot beat the game in any difficulty on their own. Besides some small amount of theory-crafting, players are also required to take control of the helm when things start going south 

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7DRLs / Re: [7DRL 2023] [WIP] Loop Dungeons

« on: March 06, 2023, 06:55:35 AM »

Day 2 update



If you think you might have just seen Chrono moonwalk, it's not a fever dream, just our second 7DRL dev-diary update  (some other images are also placeholders).

Our earlier text-based prototype now has moody tiles, as you can probably see. It also has some work-in-progress music, which you probably cannot see...

The basic frameworks for leveling, gear, enemy and combat are all up and running as you can see in this glorious one-minute-long, one-level dungeon showcase! The driver is up to date, which is the game playing itself but you can toggle it on and off at any point.

I would have liked to finish the day off having fog-of-war, combat and basic item abilities properly implemented - which I would've done if I didn't spend a couple hours at the start of the day automating build and versioning. Sad but I would've done that at some point anyway ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ so not really wasted time.

At least I'm calling it a day and going to bed a couple hours earlier than last night! That's a win, right?! Hope y'all have a nice week!

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7DRLs / [7DRL 2023] [Success] Loop Dungeons

« on: March 05, 2023, 08:40:02 AM »

Hi, hopefully it's OK to post a dev-diary style thread here?

Our entry for the 2023 7DRL event is Loop dungeons (working title), a semi-idle coffee-break roguelike that aims for a balance between traditional roguelikes, simulation games and puzzle games. Here are the planned features on day 1 (which may or may not make it into the game 7 days from now):

- Auto-explore
- Combat
  - Battle scene
  - Procedural enemy AI
  - Reactive combat
  - Enemies
    - Boss(es)
- Loot
  - Active abilities
  - Gear upgrades
- Player-driven dungeon generation
- Main menu
  - Difficulties
  - Multiple hero classes
- Soundtrack
  - Intro theme
  - Gameplay track
- Loops!
- Maybe even a better name!

The team is: me as code monkey, Felix as pixel sketcher and Alberto Martino bone-rattling to produce music.



The game is semi-idle in the sense that you can control it as a traditional roguelike, turn-by-turn but the gameplay is simple and (mostly) casual enough that a simple auto-explore function can play it for you while you watch. On easier difficulties, you can just watch your little guy go at it while you enjoy coming up with a build and making decisions about gear and levelling. On harder difficulties you'll need to leave exploration mode to play challenges more carefully or just play it manually as a traditional roguelike.

If we pull it off, the reactive combat system would be an interesting innovation to the simulation-RPG genre. Games that have combat simulation (such as idle-RPGs) are mostly played by what you do ahead-of-time leading up to combat, while in battle the game plays itself. By having a "semi-idle' combat system, we want to put emphasis on things like charging attacks and multi-turn spellcasting so that attentive players can react strategically during combat and be engaged and rewarded rather than just watch until they win or die.

I was going to post a day 1 prototype video and the intro theme song but the forum won't allow me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ if it's OK to use this thread as a dev-diary I'll try to write a status update at the end of each day!