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!
