Day 1, and the quest begins again

Another year, another 7DRL entry. My perpetual partner in crime and I are back at it again. This year things are a bit different. Rather than our typical approach of creating an exhaustive design doc (which we usually end up deviating from anyway!), we had a single simple gameplay idea. The premise is something like this:

Some naughty wizard is up to no good, messing with forces he doesn't understand and can't control. The result: the player character comes into existence. A horrible thing, with an alien and malicious intelligence. It starts off pitiful, but its nightmarish physiology allows it to take onto itself body parts and limbs that it, ahem, liberates from other creatures. It wants to escape the prison it was born into, and it has a way to do it!

There are a few issues with this idea of course. Firstly, how to visually represent the structure of its acquired parts in a way that is clear to the player, so that they can make informed decisions about how they want to grow their eldritch beast. Secondly, how is that translated into a meaningful game mechanic that is rich while not being overly complex or tedious? I don't have the answers to that quite yet, but I'm hoping that by the end of the week we can hopefully get closer to them!

So, for day 1 I did something like the following:

• Sketched and dabbled with some graphical ideas;

• Create the data structures that we'll use for managing the beasty's augments;

• Created and added some functional GUI to help manage the beasty;

• Began work on some musical tracks - so far the ideas are quite different from other things I've tried in years past, but in some ways much closer to my 'home territory';

• Tried to remember how to write GDScript. In only a year, I've managed to forget basically everything about it.

Oh, and I forgot to mention perhaps the best bit of the whole thing so far. A mere few hours before the contest began, we decided to try 3D environments this year. Neither of us have really done any 3D stuff before, so yeah...

Tomorrow will be continuing to grapple with the data needed to get combat going. Wish me luck!