I achieved some pretty nifty things in this day, although I’m definitely blurring the timeline a bit ( I overran by an hour). Thankfully, I will have more time from here.

Day 5

I started with a couple UI pieces here. An indicator of how deep in the dungeon you have delved seemed like a good idea. I was a little lazy by bolting it to the health bar.

Next, I implemented a new map generator. Arguably, this was a lower priority, but something I really want for this game is to use different map generators for different sections of the dungeon, so I set up the framework for that.

This map uses a “Random Walk” to carve out a space. The result is a pretty organic cave structure with little nooks and crannies. I added a system for finding dead-ends to hide items in, and it tries to place the stairs as far apart as possible (Dijkstra maps are amazing for this). These techniques are needed because while the original generator I used operates room by room, the random walk map isn’t generated with discrete rooms, so everything has to consider the global space when deciding where to put stuff.

The final feature of the “day” was equipment. It’s not polished, but the mechanisms are there for equipment to go into particular slots and modify the wearer’s stats or other abilities.

At this point, we are vaguely equivalent to the roguelike tutorial in terms of features which is a huge milestone in itself.

What’s Next

Today’s a big one: I took the day off (it’s Friday now) to focus on the game, but I need to plan my time carefully so it doesn’t get away from me.

I also need to start taking the shortest path to a complete game, so that I can polish everything I have tomorrow. I’m going to attempt to time-box each major feature or system as half-hour chunks and see what I can get done. If something unimportant is taking too long, I’ll move on.

So, what needs doing?

• A win condition - There’s no way to win at the moment, which isn’t good. There should be some purpose.
• End screens - When you win or lose, a window should inform you and tell you how to restart.
• Title Screen - Making the game look good on opening is important.
• Oath generator - The key hook of my game lies in here so I had better figure out how to do it.
• Oath behavior tracking - Once you take an oath, the game should know how to record your progress for it.
• Piety - The important resource for serving a deity. It’s also a consideration for…
• Magic - both a good oath reward and an interesting mechanical system to layer on top.
• Combat tweaks - I know some oaths will demand adjustments to how combat works. For example, I want the default action to be “incapacitate”, not kill, but incapacitated enemies will recover, or can be healed to life, still a threat.

I think that if I’m efficient, I can probably do most of these today, although it might be ambitious. Let’s find out.

Happy Delving!