7DRL Challenge 2013!

[Terra_Inc]

Alright everyone, it's that time of the year again.

If you were around the forums about a year ago, you might remember my thread about my (successful) participation in 2012's Seven Day Roguelike Challenge. Well, we're about to kick off this year's challenge. Some time ago the rgrd folks held the annual Call for Dates and the result was the week of 9th to 17th March.

I will be participating in the challenge, and I encourage programmers and indie game devs of all kinds to do so as well! It's seven days of pure coding, testing, bugfixing, screaming at compilers and watching other people build their games. I will continue the tradition started last year and share my dev tales here for everyone to read. Oh, and if any other MSFCian would like to participate, that would be epically awesome. Remember, it's just seven days, but it's definitely possible. I've done it, and hundreds of others have also done it before.

Here's the official announcement by Jeff Lait of Zincland.

What is a Seven Day Roguelike?

A seven Day Roguelike is a roguelike created in seven days. This means the author stopped writing code one hundred and sixty eight hours after they started writing code.

A Seven Day Roguelike (7DRL) can be written at any time. However, a general agreement was reached that it would be fun to schedule a specific week for a challenge. This allows the various authors to know that others are also desperately tracking down a bad pointer reference on the 167th hour.

The week has been chosen for the Ninth Annual 7DRL Challenge!

After an unscientific straw poll, the following scientific-looking graph was generated:
Feb 23 - Mar 3: #######
Mar 2 - Mar 10: ##############
Mar 9 - Mar 17: ################

A discursive analysis of this shows that the use of the # sign makes for an aesthetically pleasing method for representing bar graphs.
The week for the Seven Day Roguelike Challenge has been chosen!

Within the week of March 9th to March 17th, you are hereby challenged to write a roguelike in 168 hours!

To participate, follow these simple steps:
Any time on March 9th to March 17th (as measured in your time zone), register on 7drl.roguetemple.org
Write a roguelike.
After 168 hours, if you have completed a playable roguelike, add your download link to 7drl.roguetemple.org! If not, set your status to failed and we will all commiserate and agree that given a few scant more hours, it could have been great.

In case something goes wrong with 7drl.roguetemple.org registration (It won't!), use rec.games.roguelike.development as a backup.

You are encouraged to use 7drl.org for blogging your game development.

Good Luck!

(links now authorized by Maj)

 

[Terra_Inc]

Also, have a link to last year's thread. :3 My 2012 seven-day game!

 

[CABAL]

Yay! Another 7DRL challenge! Good thing it's not a 7DRM challenge. Have you thought of a theme for this one yet?

 

[Terra_Inc]

Yay! Another 7DRL challenge! Good thing it's not a 7DRM challenge. Have you thought of a theme for this one yet?

No, not really. I've gone through a few, but none of them really appealed to me. I guess it's going to be a last-minute decision just as it was last year.
That said, feel free to make suggestions. :3

 

[CABAL]

You could play as Kat, squashing trolls and spammers before they get to the site. Jetnova could be a miniboss on every level.

 

[Majestic]

You could play as Kat, squashing trolls and spammers before they get to the site. Jetnova could be a miniboss on every level.

Kat really likes that. I do too.

 

[Terra_Inc]

You could play as Kat, squashing trolls and spammers before they get to the site. Jetnova could be a miniboss on every level.

I think this is a little too specific - most people playing the thing won't even know what MSFC is. The troll-bashing thing is nice, but there aren't really a lot of interesting mechanics to support it. (Not that I don't like the idea, it just doesn't quite fit.)

Ah heck. This one will be really tough for me.

 

[Terra_Inc]

It has begun.

Spoiler: frakkin' roguelikes

Unsurprisingly, when under pressure to choose a theme, I go for good old HPL.

The game features a young and hopeful weird fiction author on a search for inspiration in the dark places of the world. The more horrible monsters you find and fight (and subsequently record in your notebook), the better your weird tales will be. Bonus points for going all the way down into the bowels of the dungeon and waking the dreaming god. Seeing only a few monsters and staying sane doesn't promise a successful career, but at least you're still alive. Being eaten by horrible monstrosities from beyond doesn't really promise any career at all, does it?

---

EDIT: I'll be posting updates both here and at the community blog 7drl.org. If you're interested in what the other challengers put out this year, take a look at the blog every now and then. There have been more than 200 registrations so far, we've never had so many participants. 7DRLC2013 is going to be huge. ^^

 

[Terra_Inc]

Devlog: Day 1

So, today was my first day of working on my game. I cannibalized some older code, wrote a bunch of new core classes, refactored old engine code, ... Things are looking fine so far, though I don't really have a lot to show yet because most of this stuff is actually backend code. Tomorrow I'll have the first full test run of the new data structures.

Spoiler: My current state of mind

(c) Radomir "TheSheep" Dopieralski

Also, the number of participants has increased again. Right now I count 339 registrations at the roguetemple. Last year we had 100. This is just freaking huge. The community blog and the #rgrd IRC channel are full of people making their games and having fun. I am super motivated and prepared to continue my work tomorrow morning!

 

[Terra_Inc]

While Maj was working on the site update, I completed my game So proud!

Get it from the download section: http://www.msfc.com.au/forum/downloads.php?do=file&id=718

Again, this is a roguelike text game in the style of Nethack and others, so prepare to be amazed by the graphics of the early 80s.
Feel free to report back, I have fixed all the bugs I could find.