7DRL Day 1: Tileset and Theme Settling

I'm in a pretty good spot for a 7-Day Roguelike (7DRL) this year.  I have the whole week off with only a car repair to worry about.  I just finished majorly refactoring my (admittedly rather rudimentary) roguelike engine for Unity, and need a simple project to work out the kinks.

That said, when I started my 7DRL on the official time of March 5th in my timezone, I found myself lacking a solid concept to develop.  The official criteria are not too restrictive: it needs to be a new game, and you need to have it reasonably finished and polished after seven days.

It also needs to be a roguelike, "with turn-based interactions in a grid-based environment, where levels are procedurally generated each play-through and death is permanent" as stated in the Jam description.  But if we just remade Rogue then that wouldn't be all that interesting or original, would it?  If I look at the brainstorming thread on the roguelikedev subreddit, the ideas seem to generally run along these themes:

• Novel settings - E.g. fighting fires, alien collecting specimens, time travel, everyone's a chess piece, etc
• Novel mechanics - E.g. the player can't directly damage enemies, controlling multiple entities, laying down fire trails, Conways game of Life mechanics, different tiles do different things, master companion for student PC, Pokemon style, etc
• Novel interface - E.g. textual adventure format.
• Demakes - E.g. of Hades, Vampire Survivor, Death Stranding, Path of Exile, Dead Cells, Rogue Legacy.  (I suppose I did the same thing with Gauntlet Rogue.)

While I pondered this over, I sought inspiration in my available tilesets.  I took my first few hours of 7DRL progress importing Oryx's "Classic Roguelike" tileset into Unity, slicing up and naming the sprites, and creating Unity Tiles for them.  Even after all that, I still didn't have a good idea of what I wanted to make.

Finally, after about 2 1/2 hours of work, I read Kyzrati's advice on the bottom of that brainstorming thread's comments, "people will not replay them that much anyway [...] it's more about interesting mechanics."  Hey, I'm coming up with those all the time.  I wager if I could just implement one, that would probably be enough.

The idea that "Illumination = Content Generation" seems like a fun mechanic to pursue.  What to call it? "Lucifer" is a good synonym for Rogue that also doubles as a bringer of light.  But maybe something that has less religious connotations.  Perhaps some kind of knavish Victorian lamp lighting profession.  Ah-ha!  They were called Leeries!  Now that's a serendipitous resemblance to Rogue, I'd be wise not to ignore it.

So it is that Leerie was born.  I switched over to the Oryx "Ultimate Roguelike" tileset because I feel it suits the theme better, but I saved my "Classic Roguelike" tileset importing progress off in case I had a use for it in the future.  I started a new Unity project and did some preliminary coding.  By mid-afternoon, I was feeling pretty wiped out.  Unless I get a second wind later today, I did enough for one day.