7DRL Day 7: A Lackluster Finish

Clocking in at almost exactly 30 hours of sheer focused development time (according to the pomodoro tracking app I was using) my 7DRL submission this year, Leerie, is done.  Since I was attempting crazy procedural generation over most of the jam, I ended up adding most of the gameplay on the last day, and it shows.  Enemy AI was written by 11:30 am...

... and perfected shortly afterward.  It seems I lost all my old sensory code, so I had to teach enemies how to see before I could teach them how to attack. My pathing code still seems a little weird, I watched these vermin scuttle under lampposts and disappear at times.  But no time to investigate!

By 2 pm, I had my lamp oil drops working.  Most of the item code was just fine.  I didn't use most of the item code anyway.  I just created an action that poofs away lamp oil items and increments the lamp oil variable on the character.  Sorry, inventory handling methods and variables, maybe next time!

By 4 pm, I had the victory and defeat scenes created in.  Thanks once again to Da Font for being there when I needed them.  Where else could I get an Olde English font on short notice?

By 5:15 pm, a passable UI added to the roguelike scene.  Health, number of lights left to light, and lamp oil level indicators added.  It was hacked together slapdash as ordered chaos itself.  I'm not good at grokking Unity's UI system.  I don't know if I want to be.  Seems like a rather esoteric skill that will become obsolete when Unity comes out with yet another way of doing the UI anyway.

I reserved the lower right portion of the screen for a music control button.  I had the idea of perhaps running background music, like Chopin's Nocturne or Mozart's Moonlight Sonata.  That would have been a pretty quick and dirty way to add a ton of ambiance.  But I decided against it.  A game this shallow, it felt too much like riding their coattails to me.  Had I gone that route and had more time, perhaps make the whole game look like a silent film with title cards for dialogue.  That would have been cheeky, tee hee.

Around 5:30pm, I was compiling my first WebGL build for itch.io.  Unity took about 10 minutes to get that build done, threatening to melt my CPU all the way, and what it spat out ultimately didn't work!  One helpful Google later I learned I needed to turn on "Decompression Fallback" under the Player Settings -> Other Settings for it to work on itch.io.  Phew! 

Then there were four more builds, quibbling over this and that: minor text corrections on the victory/defeat screens.  I added a defeat screen to running out of lamp oil. The last version (1.0d) went up shortly before 8pm today, my last day of the jam. 

That's about all I could manage today.  Frankly, I'm exhausted.  I've been exhausted since the mid-afternoon slump.  Company will be over tonight and staying the weekend.  I work tomorrow.  So, even if Darren Grey threw in an extra bonus day this year, my time is up.  

It's clear I needed more time to add more diversity and depth to the content and the gameplay. But I was fairly satisfied with how much player thought and interaction was required to succeed!

I'm a little sad that the scope of Leerie ended up so much less than I wanted to do.  I didn't get to dazzle anyone with my amazing just-in-time content generation methods.  No branching roads or buildings interiors.  No friendly NPCs to rescue from the dark.  Not even much variety to the maps being generated!  I kept getting tripped up by sheer brass tacks and my own ineptitude, focusing too much on the procedural-generation aspect (WhyBorgs all over again).  In the end, Leerie was another puzzle game with roguelike undertones (like Hungry Little Space Rogue) than a full-fledged procedural RPG.

But I finished a game, even if it was a lot less ambitious than I planned at the beginning. More importantly, I proved I can stop navel gazing and bring together a program into a cohesive whole that can be called a game.  In the end, isn't that what 7DRLs are all about?