So the 2012 7DRLC has come and gone and I've finished my third and best entry. I've looked at some posts and announcements that others have made but have only tried a couple other entries so far. Without getting "official" feedback from this years judges and without comparing my entry to the others, I have to ask myself: what went right? What went wrong? What did I learn? And what can I do differently?
Right. I had a plan and stuck with it when it worked and dropped it when it didn't. I got a zeldalike overworld that was aesthetically pleasing and fairly interesting. I got a bunch of different items to use, most of which have a passive and active use. I also have fairly intelligent rivals that really push you forward and made the game much more fun. The random monsters were sometimes fun and I really liked the camouflage and calling for help. The code - while a bit on the spaghetti side - was mostly decent and did use events. In the end I had a game that was somewhat fun with a clear indication of progress and you could win by cautious exploration, reckless combat, or an opportunistic combination of both. I also had someone playtest and spot so many spelling errors.
Wrong. The overworld sometimes had inaccessible places. It's rare and not game breaking, unless you start on a tiny area and can't escape, but it happens. The evasion thing was pretty uninteresting and some of the items aren't as useful or interesting as others. I tried to make all items equally interesting and useful but that didn't work out as well as I thought. I ditched many of my ideas because they were just not fun. Sometimes the monsters were too overpowering or just uninteresting. The game was often to short to really get into it. I also had a hard time deploying as an applet and eventually just provided a download link. That really sucked since a big part of choosing java was being able to play it in the browser. The biggest problem was that I also spent the middle portion of my week flubbing around and spastically tweaking things left and right without a clear plan. It was chaotic and I moved sideways as much as I moved forward, if that makes any sense.
Learned. Worldgen shouldn't be all or nothing - if I could make one "room" or "screen", check it, and then accept or reject it on its own then I could avoid having inaccessible sections and unintentional dead ends. I don't think I could have done the items much better since I originally had detailed plans that just turned out to be uninteresting. That's not to say they couldn't be done better but I think that's one thing that you just have to get right through iteration and hands on playtesting. My weakness was probably the items and item balancing and I probably should have stuck with the the best parts: worldgen and rivals. Not that it matters that much - the game is so short that I often see only a small portion of it before the game ends. I think that the more randomness a game has and the more content it has to explore, the more chances you need to overcome the randomness and the more time you need to explore. I'll have to make a post on randomness and the number of choices required to rise above being slave to the RNG.
Next time. I tend to go overboard with my ideas; like having a zelda overworld, random monsters, evasion, 2 item max, rivals, and fame percent all in one seven day project. Although it's great having different options to explore, the items were probably my weakness. I should either focus on that and practice making item-based roguelikes or ditch it for the next 7DRL. The events were also a bit of a mixed blessing. When should I use events and when should I code things inline? It was also difficult to control the order of when messages appeared and deal with situations where one action would have similar events published and logged. I'll try dropping the event based thing and rely on explicitly sequenced overrides and callbacks as an alternative. Yeah, it's tightly coupled, but I also have the control I need. I also need to have specific goals for each session: worldgen, rivals, polish, etc and not have generic "content". That's how I end up with a bunch of items most people will never see and even fewer will like. Lastly, java isn't as cross platform and easy to deploy as I thought. I'll have to look more into Flash for my next roguelike.
So, have a plan but ditch it when it doess't work and focus on your strengths since your strong points will make your project a success and your weak points will, at best, be a waste of time, and, at worse, may overshadow your strengths. Also, if you can, have someone else playtest it. Once I get more feedback from the fine people at the roguetemple and other folks who review my game, I'll come up with a retrospective part 2.
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