Finished!


My #7DRL game, Catacombs, is done! Play it here.

Overall I feel pretty good about the challenge, and the game. I kept the game within scope, and delivered a small, decently polished experience.

First, a couple shout-outs to other creators whose assets I used:

Let's do a mini post-mortem!

Things that went pretty well:

  • Started with an existing turn-based prototype, in my custom HTML5 stack. This really let me hit the ground running in terms of going straight to gameplay and content.
  • Leveraged existing tools, like Tiled
  • Simple tweaks to standard roguelike mechanics (permadeath, hunger clock)
  • Arcade style, endless meta game (easy to implement, no bosses, etc)

Things that didn't go so well:

  • Procedural generation. I didn't end up with as much variety/emergence as I would have liked because of  an overly simple procedural generator. (Floors are static with 1-4 object layout variants, and I only made 5 floors)

Feels good to ship something small and complete. Looking forward to doing this again in 2021 :)

Comments

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(+2)

Did you use Djinn for this, or one of your side project micro-engines?

(+3)

Side project micro-engine :)

Djinn hasn't aged well, and I'm militant about using TypeScript these days.

If you're curious, the source is on GitHub.

(+1)

Strong approval on the use of TypeScript! Neat! Why yarn over npm?

(+1)

I switched from using npm to yarn back when yarn first released since it was faster and had "locking". I gather that newer versions of npm are on par now, but I haven't had a compelling reason to swap back.