Day 5: Frostbite

Started later than I planned, but I think I still made some decent progress overall today.

Day 5

My main goal for the day was working on the different basic elements of magic. I really wanted each element to have something to do, and they ideally should be unique and interesting. Here’s what we ended up with, for “conjuration”:

• Fire (I did this yesterday) - now it does less initial damage, and instead damages over time)
• Water - Pushes a target and douses fire.
• Earth - Simple attack, but it hits harder
• Air - Pushes targets (further, but it can’t push you while you’re in water), and it will chill water into ice for a little bit.

To get these all working, I had to implement ice and the various environmental interactions there. Fire melting ice, ice freezing someone in place, etc. I think in the end it came together well enough for a 7DRL.

After this, I wanted to work on the next type of magic: “infusion”. You can imbue yourself or a target with a specific element to have some lasting effect, in addition to the more curative effects.

For example, imbuing yourself with Earth makes you more solid, better at defense, but it would also slow you down. imbuing with air lets you move faster, but hitting things becomes more difficult, etc.

In addition to this, I was making some small adjustments to the UI here and there for clarity, to just put more information out to the player. It’s a theme I’ll be continuing for the next couple days too.

Next Steps

Five days down, two left! I’m starting to feel the time pressure, and there’s still a lot to do. I think I need to start by making the current experience into an actual game. This involves:

• Setting up procedural generation for levels, with brand new environmental features
  • Testing that new environment doesn’t break existing generation
  • Generate levels based on the thematic progression (I might need a new generator for this too)
• Add monsters to the game which are challenging to deal with, but also education
• A lot of knowledge-transfer features are still missing.

And that’s a short list. There’s so much more to do!

Wish me luck! See you on twitch if you’re interested!