RADiaNTFoRM 7DRL postmortem

So, my 7DRL game is done now and I actually played through and beat it normally.

Something that made me realize is that I really should have added some sort of gem/rune finder since figuring out where a room that has them can be tricky.

Anyway, about making it:

I started seriously thinking about taking part and what would I do if I did about a week before the event, I've been trying to get more familiar with Godot and have a project for it that's just a character creator at the moment so adding a roguelike game to that seemed like a decent option but for whatever reason didn't really feel like doing that, thanks to having seen some people talking about doing games mainly in pure JS without using Twine or such I ended up deciding that I could at least do some tutorial to see if that'd be a reasonable option, so I started going through https://nluqo.github.io/broughlike-tutorial/ with the vague plan to after that get more familiar with rot.js or Dryad Quest engine and then make a game with the help of either of them.

As I was getting to the end of the tutorial I started to realize that going through it took me so long that I probably wouldn't have much time for learning about anything else so just using the game the tutorial makes you do as a base started to seem like the best option if I didn't want to just use Godot afterall. I did manage to include some things from rot.js(seeded RNG and mapgen) but for example it's pathfinding and line of sight stuff forever remained in my to do at some point list.

Anyway to focus less on the code and such and more on what I was going for, I'd recently played Rift Wizard and quite liked much of it and thought what if something like that started you off without any spells and you'd have to sneak past enemies and on reaching the bottom you'd finally unlock spells and needed to ascend using them but now enemies actually can sense you anywhere, or something like that. That thought probably also stems from when I beat the wonderful Brogue for the first time and found going back through the levels kind of boring,

So while that's not what I ended up doing that gave me the vague idea and goal of a game where you sneak around monsters or use spells to deal with them instead of hunting them down and beating them up. And speaking of sneaking around, I thought The Agnietta was pretty interesting especially it's crawling and liquid systems so I thought I'd like to do something like that but I didn't end up really doing any crawl only spaces despite thinking about them a bunch. I did also think about player being able to shrink or control a doll of sorts so that interacting with smaller enemies could be more interesting but I kind of forgot about that after noting that I probably wouldn't have any unbirth or such happening.

I've also quite enjoyed Wordle(and the many many clones and remixes of it) and been a long time fan of Mastermind and Einstein puzzle(remake of Sherlock) so I planned to have rooms or exits blocked by a puzzle where you need to insert different runes/letters/words in a specific order. Somewhat relatedly, while word games are nice I generally think universally enjoyable games that don't require knowing a specific language, such as Another World and Rain World, are neat which lead me to decide that if there's going to be any text or such it should be in some constructed language and make everything relevant learnable in-game. I didn't get to doing anything meaningful with any of that, all of the gems/runes/whatever you pick up do internally have an Toki Pona word associated with them to potentially use in a puzzle of sorts but for them to be used I'd have needed a way display and select the words/symbols and for that I thought having magical tattoos in a close up image of character's torso seemed like a good way to do that. Initially I was thinking I'd use sitelen sitelen symbols for that(nice thing about them(and Mayan script) is that they look like physical objects that you could push around which made me really want to do a game where you do that) but after doing a UI mockup(

)I realized that sitelen pona symbols would work better in that context so made graphics for some of them before deciding to focus on other things.

Speaking of that UI mockup, I wanted sound to be important and potentially the only clue you'd have about presence of enemies(being entirely blind possibly being a common and preferable situation since most lights could be indicators of enemy presence) but to make that more accessible and more prominent I wanted to do a soundmap which would indicate all the sounds along with their rough position but that didn't happen due to never getting around to doing line of sight and the super simple darkness system I did do coming in very late. Another sound thing I was hoping to do is to make use of StereoPannerNode or such to make hearing which sounds are to left and which to right possible but after getting just distance based sound volume working early on never got around to doing more with that.

The "angels, lords and leaders" in the mockup is something I was pretty sure I wouldn't have time to do but the rough idea was that each monster race would have a guardian angel of sorts and/or a leader that you could negotiate with to gain some benefits in exchange for some services(possibly similar to soul contracts in Cursed Armor) and in addition to that you'd sort of have the souls of your party members from Cursed Princess(or at least the ones I'd keep if I were to redo that) with you and you could listen to their suggestions(that would most likely go against no language required) and by behaving according to their expectations or something you'd gain ability to temporarily turn into them/be possessed by them(thanks Town of Magic for making me potentially want that) or otherwise gain different abilities allowing you to play a very differently for a bit.

Making the overall map into 2d one where you move in compass directions instead of a 1d one where you just move up or down was partly motivated by a youtube video I watched about secret bases and the realization that bases don't really(or at least easily) make sense to have in the latter case, that video also probably helped with my decision to have crawling as a major mechanic and a way to avoid enemies(secret bases and crawling into them to hide away seem like a natural fit).

Winning the game requires you to charge a magic circle with bunch of power, not quite sure how I ended up with that, it kind of just happened naturally without much planning, I made bunch of magic circle graphics without knowing what I'd use them for, I needed an use for the runes besides just spell casting and I needed some reason to return "home" instead of being fine with always forging ahead with no breaks.

Speaking of spell casting, idea was to have a system where casting a spell would leave behind a resource used to cast it that you'd want to later return to collect, early on some particulars of the implementation made me think that having a short delay before being able to recollect the resource would be fine but later on I started to feel like the initial plan of needing to wait a day or so for them to reappear would be better, I ended up doing something in the middle with some spells being at either extreme.

What else should I talk about? Oh yeah, the name! After struggling to think of a nice, concise and new name I thought I'd go with tried and true just describe the game for several words and mainly use the acronym(ie. MLiaCTNV or MLiaC for short) and ended up with "Running Around in a Mysterious Dimension Full of Monsters" - RAiaMDFoM but then thought RAiaMDFoRM would sound better and after figuring out what the R could stand for noticed that isn't that almost Radiant Form? That sounds cool and almost like something out of Hollow Knight. So after some "words stating with _" lookups arrived at "Running Around Dressless in a Nascent Territory Full of Rowdy Monsters" I specifically wanted to add the word nascent to the name after seeing it since it's a term I'm familiar with thanks to having read some xianxia novels(such as World of Cultivation, Poisoning The World, Against The Gods and Will Eternal).

Probably could write more and/or better but I've spent long enough on this.