It has been a while, how are you doing?

This month is a good one : the sun starts to come out more often again, the temperature increases, and, most importantly, the 7DRLC is just around the corner!

What is that gibberish you ask? Well, 7DRLC stands for ‘Seven Days Roguelike Challenge’, a week long game jam where the goal is to write a roguelike. Simple enough. And this year will see me participate for the first time. The jam starts when you decide on saturday or sunday, and will go on until next weekend, same time as when you started.

Choosing an idea was the easiest part. For the longest time, I have wanted to start working on a roguelike based on the book/movie/manga ‘Battle Royale’. So that is what I am going to attempt next week.

May the ASCII serve me well…

My battle plan is to keep the game as simple as possible while evoking some of the key aspects of the Battle Royale ‘atmosphere’. I will be using libtcod and Python to be as comfortable as possible with the coding part and be capable of debugging efficiently.

I have yet to make a day-to-day schedule, but I have broken down the functionality I want to add along the way, it goes like this :

• Map generation : generating a flat (no height shenanigans) island-shaped map, with some simple features such as lakes, rocks, and trees or the odd building here and there;
• Movement and field of view : I will probably end up using something quite different for the handling of the field of view, but I will need to see if it is actually fun or not;
• Other students and combat : Surely limited to bump-to-melee and ranged attacks. Though depending on how the field of view thing works out, things could be a little more involved.
• Time and forbidden zones : A key element of Battle Royale is the fact that the students have only 3 days to kill one another, so time should, and will, play a role;
• Ressources : I hope to add some kind of food/water/other ressource management to increase the ‘survivalist’ part of the equation, but this will depend on the time;
• Other ‘flavor’ things : I have a list of other features that would reinforce the theme, but I will neither spoil them here nor implement them if time is short;

So there is my plan in vague terms, I do like that it is a 6-item plans, because if I can manage one of them each day, I will be left with a full day to polish/debug. And that seems like a pretty good idea.

I will be around during the challenge, either posting more updates, on the #rgrd channel, or on various social networks. See you around!