7DRL Success: The Challenge!

[XLambda]

Since my 7DRL started as an idea on roguetemple, I thought I might announce its successful completion here.

Play a young and hopeful programmer trying to write a 7DRL as he faces certain doom in the Dungeons of Development! Get through the dungeon before the Seven Days of Magic are over! Wield powerful weapons such as vi and emacs! Run from bugs and segfaults! Drink massive amounts of coffee to increase your laziness! And other stuff.

Download (including source): http://sites.google.com/site/weirdrogue/7drl-2012

I personally liek it a lot, it's my very first 7DRL. I certainly lost some time to not having lots of code left over from previous projects, but it still turned out nice, I think. I hope at least some people will have fun with it.

[Z]

Congrats for the success!

My first score is 4226. It is nice how you need to find a good balance between exploring the levels and finishing in the hard time limit.

I like how my suggestion for stats has been used And also some suggestion from 7DRL.org IIRC about having a "family affair" monster. Although the stats seemed to become all 64 for me quite quickly.

Since the roguelike genre seems to attract so many programmers for some reason, I think this is a great theme, and that it allows roguelikes with much more abstract and original gameplay than the traditional fantasy dungeons. I hope it will be explored in the future (either as improvements to this one, or in another project). I have thought a bit about such a theme myself, but the only real idea I got was the names for stats.

I am unable to move diagonally, it was not clear for me whether this is intentional, especially since the monsters do move diagonally. Also the non-moving monsters look a bit weird. I have checked the source and it seems this both are intentional. Probably the help should make it clear.

[XLambda]

Congrats for the success!

My first score is 4226. It is nice how you need to find a good balance between exploring the levels and finishing in the hard time limit.

I like how my suggestion for stats has been used And also some suggestion from 7DRL.org IIRC about having a "family affair" monster. Although the stats seemed to become all 64 for me quite quickly.

That is quite a nice score, and thanks! that was the intention I had when writing it. It's quite easy to just dive down and finish the game, but sticking around and getting more points requires to keep an eye on the clock. It's like the real challenge: You can do a halfhearted job and be done quickly or dedicate yourself to making something good within the Seven Days.
And I just can't resist a good idea - when I read the suggestions in the idea thread, I knew I had to do that one. 

I am unable to move diagonally, it was not clear for me whether this is intentional, especially since the monsters do move diagonally. Also the non-moving monsters look a bit weird. I have checked the source and it seems this both are intentional. Probably the help should make it clear.

Yes, I wanted to do diagonal movement, but I somehow screwed up and decided to spend the time overhauling the interface. I might write a post-challenge patch for that.

Also, I noticed I left the debug messages in. That was't intended, I've removed them and am busy putting the clean version online. 

[kraflab]

Cool game, really great for 7 days.

My score was 4526.  Like above, I hit max stats early, around 60%.  My suggestion would be to make the enemies give you points once you have max stats.  It makes sense to me that fixing a bug should improve your code after all.  I finished the game with around 2 days left, and collected pretty much everything I could, so having the monsters give points would create another balance between spending time on bugs and trying to finish on time (which makes sense to me in this context).  Early on you want to create a working build, then later on you want to fix up the loose ends to add some polish.

I really thought the AI was spot on.  They basically camp you at the doorways, causing you to have to fight them to get inside the room.

IIRC, the controls don't mention how to use a patch, which I eventually realized was f, but you might want to make a note of that somewhere in game.

But really, great job, fun game (though a little too easy in my opinion).

[XLambda]

Cool game, really great for 7 days.

My score was 4526.  Like above, I hit max stats early, around 60%.  My suggestion would be to make the enemies give you points once you have max stats.  It makes sense to me that fixing a bug should improve your code after all.  I finished the game with around 2 days left, and collected pretty much everything I could, so having the monsters give points would create another balance between spending time on bugs and trying to finish on time (which makes sense to me in this context).  Early on you want to create a working build, then later on you want to fix up the loose ends to add some polish.

I really thought the AI was spot on.  They basically camp you at the doorways, causing you to have to fight them to get inside the room.

IIRC, the controls don't mention how to use a patch, which I eventually realized was f, but you might want to make a note of that somewhere in game.

But really, great job, fun game (though a little too easy in my opinion).

Thanks! Yeah, I'll probably end up doing a little post-challenge tweaking. I've already corrected the in-game help regarding the fire command, I simply forgot that in the hurry.

Fun fact: The unpatched 7drl was SVN revision 64. That was unintentional and quite a surprise for me.

[Kyzrati]

Great game XLambda! First thing I did after finishing my own 7DRL was play this game so I could relive the experience!

I only got 4036 points, and I searched all levels and "fixed" everything I saw (the idea of "fixing" family affairs is rather humorous). Maybe the lower score because there were absolutely no enemies generated on the last level. Weird, huh?

Fun concept, though as others mention, stats were maxed out pretty early, so most of the items became useless, and I finished a bit too early as well, considering I explored everything. I also had more than 100 unused patches left by the end, so I could've dealt with a lot more problems...

[XLambda]

Great game XLambda! First thing I did after finishing my own 7DRL was play this game so I could relive the experience!

I only got 4036 points, and I searched all levels and "fixed" everything I saw (the idea of "fixing" family affairs is rather humorous). Maybe the lower score because there were absolutely no enemies generated on the last level. Weird, huh?

Fun concept, though as others mention, stats were maxed out pretty early, so most of the items became useless, and I finished a bit too early as well, considering I explored everything. I also had more than 100 unused patches left by the end, so I could've dealt with a lot more problems...

Glad to hear that you enjoyed it! Yeah, it's waay too easy, I'm already working on a post-challenge patch to make it a little more challenging. The actual 7DRL (apart from fixing annoying bugs) will stay like this, though, otherwise it just wouldn't be a 7DRL.

[XLambda]

While fixing the last bugs for the soon-to-be-out v1.1 of this one, I ran a test on a linux system. OMG, the lag. Granted, I was running it over a remote desktop, but it was horrible compared to how smooth it runs on my local win system.

I don't have a local testing system set up currently, so feedback would be extremely helpful. Have any of you people been running the game on a linux system? If yes, did you experience any considerable lag?

[Z]

I have been running on Linux, and do not remember any lag.

[XLambda]

I have been running on Linux, and do not remember any lag.

Thanks a lot, that saves me some headaches. And a lot of coding trouble as well.