Halfway thru the 2010 7DRL Challenge, the count goes up to 84 challengers!

Follo the development of the entries at teh newsgroup!

Seven Day Roguelike by ~purplearcanist on deviantART

Alrighty, the week is half way over, and I do have a little progress to report.  It turns out I had the beginnings of an engine developed for an old idea based on the Brother’s War series of Magic: The Gathering books.  (It was to be an experiment in a pure magic-user RL with an emphasis on area magic.)  This gave me a little bit of a leg up in preparing my walk-around engine, but not much more.

Since 7 days isn’t near enough for me and I have plenty of other things to do with my time, I had to intentionally narrow the focus of my RL.  I’m going for a smaller map size (25 x 25) with no dungeons.  The random map generation will be all overworld, and as long as I don’t put too many rocks on a single level, I shouldn’t have to worry about pathfinding.

Presently, I’m going to have a world map that is 21 x 21 sectors large.  You start in the center sector and will expand out from there as your Terrapack increases in power levels.  As I mentioned above, each sector will be a 25 x 25 tile map that includes terrain elements based on the elevation and humidity of the area.  These values are randomly generated as the map expands based on the elevation and humidity of surrounding tiles.  This means you could end up playing completely on mountain tops, or you might find your way into a valley full of springs and ponds.  I’d like to have unique vegetation tiles, but we’ll see how much time affords me to do.  If nothing else, I have good plans for continuing the project!

I’m going to start by simply populating maps with minerals to harvest.  I decided mining ore should wait for underground exploration in a version of Terraforma to be continued post-competition.  If I can get the distribution right, you should never get “stuck”.  There should always be enough minerals to keep your Terrapack powered up, but it could get tricky in later stages as new areas of exploration become farther and farther apart.

The game HUD is pretty simple.  I’m centering the display on a 640 x 480 screen and include three regions as pictured below, a status bar for player stats and inventory information, the main map area including your coordinates and the elevation / humidity of the current sector, and a sector map on the far right that will display a tile of all the inhabitable sectors with a different symbol for elevation and color for humidity.

I’m still excited about this project, and I’m happy mostly that I’m coming up with ideas for expansion after the competition.  That’s really what this was all about for me… preparing something I can develop over the course of the next year until the next 7DRL.  Hopefully I can still implement combat before time’s up, but I won’t hold my breath. 

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Barbarians lurk in the land, staring at me curiously!

Barbarians, lots of them

Added confirmation and settlement names

Added barbarian unit groups and simple AI (Lots of object factoring…)

I am a bit behind schedule! must plan a bit tomorrow to ensure this will get done well!

Aprox Work Time: 9:30 (7:00 + 2:30)