Release / Day 6 & 7: Out on a limb

Our 7DRL game is released! Rather: our game's 7DRL release is! (Two days ago.) I've marked it as 'incomplete' because it's not quite feature-complete, buggy and unpolished... but you shouldn't set your standards too high for a 7DRL. We'll continue working on it, because we don't want to set our standards 7DRL-low.

Normally I'd be unhappy to release a game in this state but I think there's interesting things that you don't need polish or balanced combat to try out. Things which I was uneasy about initially but now seem to work, such having an equipment system for your limbs. I'd thought collecting equipment was redundant to collecting limbs, but it gives you extra considerations when deciding which limbs to attach (and I hope in future, where). And losing limbs is displayed graphically so you don't need to read combat messages too closely as I feared.

Day 6 & 7: Out on a limb

After mapgen was acceptable I largely worked on graphical polish in the final two days. I even spent time touching up sprites Seilburg generated with the pixellab.ai tool instead of just asking him to regenerate.

Alcoves came back with a vengence! They refused to cast shadows from most but not all of their faces. Finally found a "Cast shadows: double sided" mesh setting that fixed it. They don't have back-faces, but neither do the normal walls! I don't understand.

I rewrote the map renderer, twice, trying out different methods of displaying 3D meshes -- Godot has a few. GridMap is easy but very inflexible: I wanted to be able to fade wall pieces out for a tile-based Field of View. However I never actually got to adding FoV so the rewrite was helpful. Plugging in my FoV code will be fast but I didn't have time. The 3D lighting is a decent substitute plus restricting allowed camera pitch & distance to not see too far.

What I did achieve by rewriting map rendering was breaking positioning of alcove meshes again! I also struggled to position meshs for tables and cabinets. (They're just decoration in the 7drl release.)

I even added a custom shader to ignore normals on billboarded sprites for lighting, so they can be lit from behind. Seilburg also added normal maps. Looks better... what's that? He inverted the normals for alcoves. -_- Well this time I got him to fix them.

I was a bit surprised that he spent much of the last 12 hours adding content, such as a wide variety of equipment, instead of the most pressing gameplay matters.

I admit, at the same time (and all the time) I was adding dumb stuff like hostile/nonhostile indicators on NPCs when we had absolutely no reason to add nonhostile NPCs and had never discussed them. But they were so easy to implement! Just an 'if' or two, the code's mostly copied from a previous game! Of course, all the work is always in the flow-on stuff, like drawing and redrawing the indicators until they're just the right size and colour and positioning them correctly, at the right moment, and removing them... Nonhostile NPCs do have one use: they let the player decide when to attack, to self-regulate the difficulty. Err... you can't actually attack non-hostiles.

In fact, I only added AI for hostile NPCs 7 hours into day 7. At least, I thought I'd made NPCs attack. I kept saying there was something wrong but didn't investigate. Finally... *five hours after the deadline* it hit me: only the minotaur enemies hit (because they have axes), the innate attacks on other enemies don't work! The minotaurs hit so hard that it hardly mattered that the others were hard of hitting. Definitely 'Incomplete'.

Seilburg wrote nearly the whole body part system including GUI, equipment, attacks, stat bonuses, part definitions, and display. But by day 6 it was time I helped, firstly connecting the body part sprites at attachment points. I made limbs wave around slowly, and more aggressive when walking or attacking -- it looks like a different animation. Then I had the idea that whatever point you're standing on should be the fixed point rather than your central bodypart. It looked great but had side effects on position alignment. Trying to fix it, I progressively broke camera positioning, sprite billboarding, lighting, and not falling through the floor. It was a struggle to undo it all and get back to where I started (make git commits often!). Hours lost.

The intro (including its room decorations) was the last thing added before the deadline, but I put in a (joke) ending only afterwards, so that's excluded from the 7DRL version. You would have hated it.