A game about time travel. Your goal is to track down 5 legendary artifacts, so it's somewhat of a mystery game. And you should use pen and paper!
Features a Qud style world map, procedural history with hundreds of NPCs, procedural books, and dirt simple combat.
http://humbit.com/shadow/After 4 times doing 7drl, this is the closest I came to declaring failure, but after all the game had a lot of cool stuff and there was a working victory condition:
As far as the development, it was very tough. I knew it was an ambitious idea, but the difficulty of writing the time travel, fixing unending bugs, and managing the RNG (so that history was guaranteed to repeat itself unless you intervene) was a shock.
I also spent a lot of time fiddling with pathfinding, because I was trying to do some stupid things and I had forgotten a bit about how A* worked. At one point, I was trying to pathfind NPCs at a distance of 1000 tiles (which I figured was reasonable) and was totally perplexed at why rot.js was visiting 4.5 million tiles to accomplish this! Turns out that this is sort of the expected result when one is using manhattan distance. I spent a whole night trying to write my own pathfinding, which sort of worked but was buggy, before finally breaking the pathfinding down into chunks. The chunking method worked fine. All in all, I spent about 5 days on a single feature: getting NPC heroes to walk from their city to a dungeon, climb to the bottom, try to fight a boss, and return if successful.
As you can guess, the game didn't quite live up to what I imagined, though I think it's still pretty damn cool. I spent the last few days after the challenge fixing bugs and polishing it, which I feel a little guilty about. But I simply had to revisit it to get some closure.
So I put out v1.2 this morning. I'm much happier with it.
