7DRL Challenge

To quote at length from an e-mail posted by Jeff Lait on the rec.games.roguelike.development newsgroup:

What is a Seven Day Roguelike?

A Seven Day Roguelike is a roguelike created in seven days. This means
the author stopped writing code one hundred and sixty eight hours
after they started writing code.

--------------

A Seven Day Roguelike (7DRL) can be written at any time. However, a
general agreement was reached that it would be fun to schedule a
specific week for a challenge. This allows the various authors to know
that others are also desperately tracking down a bad pointer reference
on the 167th hour.

The week has been chosen for the Seventh Annual 7DRL Challenge!

After an unscientific straw poll, the following scientific-looking
graph was generated:

Feb 25 - Mar  4: #########
Mar  3 - Mar 11: ##########
Mar 10 - Mar 18: ###################

A discursive analysis of this shows that the use of the # sign makes
for an aesthetically pleasing method for representing bar graphs.

The week for the Seven Day Roguelike Challenge has been chosen!

Within the week of March 10th to March 18th, you are hereby challenged
to write a roguelike in 168 hours!

To participate, follow these simple steps:

1) Any time on March 10th or March 18th (as measured in your time
zone), post to rec.games.roguelike.development that you have started
work on your Seven Day Roguelike.
2) Write a roguelike.
3) After 168 hours, if you have completed a playable roguelike, post
your success to rec.games.roguelike.announce!  If not, post your lack
of results to rec.games.roguelike.development, where we will all
commiserate and agree that given a few scant more hours, it could
have been great.

Good Luck!

I will try to post a reminder message the Wednesday before the
challenge.

Just a note regarding point (1): I’m pretty certain Jeff meant “Any time on March 10th or March 11th.” The 18th is probably not the best day to start (unless you’re planning to make an out-of-challenge roguelike, that is).

I’m looking forward to this year’s challenge week, and I hope you are too!

Hello folks! I hope you’re well and enjoying the new year. Here are a couple of updates.

First, it’s time to decide when to have the Seven-Day Roguelike Challenge for 2012! So post the dates that you would prefer either (a) here or (b) on r.g.r.d. on r.g.r.d. (the rec.games.roguelike.development newsgroup).

Second, I’ve just updated the blog software and plugins. If you encounter any problems, e-mail me@tomlarsen.org.

After six weeks of polishing and porting we present you Pitman, the iOS game! Thanks to Unity it was (relatively) easy to make a version of “Pitman Krumb” that runs on iPhone and iPad.

The controls were optimized for the different sizes of the phone and the pad, and of course the interface and the balancing of the gameplay got an overhaul. We also added a new type of dungeon and a new enemy. You can get a free test version on the App Store, and of course buy the full game there, too.

The reason why we decided to make Pitman our first commercial game is that we had so much fun participating in this challenge – so we dropped our “real” project and did this instead.

So, thanks again for this opportunity to the organizers, and all the other challengers! It was a very cool experience!

I didn’t manage to finish my roguelike for 7DRLC 2011, ZombieRL, in time. In the end I actually found the idea rather boring. It’s kinda hard to develop a decent storyline centred around mindless zombie-killing, and the kind of horror atmosphere I was aiming for is really hard to do well in a roguelike.

So I plan to make an out-of-challenge 7DRL called Orc Redemption. In Orc Redemption, you will play as an orc who has decided to defect from the underground empire and warn the human colonies up above of an impending invasion. Your character will need to sabotage, fight, assassinate, and stealthily make his or her way to the surface. The other orcs will react accordingly…

Wish me luck.

I have finally gotten around to uploading the source.  The bad news is that I have never attempted to build it on any other platform but windows.

Currently it requires:

• OpenGL
• SDL
• freetype2 lib

It comes with a Visual Studio 2005 solution and it should build without any other downloads.  Should work with 2005 express.

If anyone can build this let me know, especially if it is a linux build or something like it.

http://code.google.com/p/ioc/ -look at the download section

Cheers corremn

I just got some time this weekend and decided on fixing some problems in the original release of DML. Those are fairly simple ones but improve gameplay a lot. Hope you’ll enjoy it!

Download: DML-2.0 post-7DRL update

This is the complete list of changes since the 7DRL release:
-’L'ook action:
—the cursor can now go out of the LOS
—you can stop looking by pressing ESC now
—you can use numpad to navigate, diagonal movement is available now
-Combat:
—enemies don’t freeze next to you diagonally anymore, they can attack you from
any direction
—corrected player damage type calculation bug – now the soul damaging weapons
will shine
—devils are now immune to lava
-Help:
—added info about monsters and their damage types
—added info about weapons and their damage types
—added Manual
-Other:
—corrected some of the spelling errors
( and probably added some other )
—pressing ENTER skips all the messages
—pressing ENTER doesn’t open help screen anymore
( dunno why it treated enter as ‘?’ )
—player character is now hightlighted by the cursor

Picking up where I left off last weekend (my list is randomized), I’ve put up 5 more reviews today on the ol’ blog. At this point I am already seeing @-signs behind my eyelids and I am only about 40% through all of the entries. Onward!!!

Today’s games are:

• Stygia
• Regicide!
• Light
• Monster Slayer Show (yessss)
• Mad Mage

I tried to play a few other games but they were unavailable on my platform (windows XP).

Once again, the sheer quantity of work that has been done on this challenge is insane. (Possibly in a literal sense )

Game on!

I’ve played and reviewed 15 of this year’s 7DRLs. You can read what I have to say here:

http://www.randomstuff.org.uk/~geoffrey/roguelikes/reviews/reviews.html

Games reviewed:

• Broken Bottle
• Destiny of Heroes
• Elite International Detective
• God of Change
• Inversion Of Control
• Kusemono
• Light
• Magicko
• Monster Slayer Show
• Pitman Krumb
• Rook
• The Man in the Mirror
• Twelve Hours
• Vicious Orcsv
• 7DRLCC

I would like to add my congratulations to everyone who completed a 7DRL this year, whether or not I’ve had chance to play it yet!

I’ve been chipping away at Rook since the end of the 7DRL challenge, but I haven’t put together a package with the simple bugfix it needed.  Today you can get the bugfix version, which is still a legitimate 7DRL, or the first post-7DRL version.  Unless you’re judging this for the challenge, get the post-7DRL version.  It adds a few new features like restarting the game, dropping items, and getting to see what happens after you’re in checkmate, and tweaks the sot AI to make them stupid in a more interesting way.

The post-7DRL version (1.0.1):

• Source and 32-bit Linux Binary: rook.101.tar.gz
• Windows Binary: rook-1.0.1.zip

The bugfix version:

• Source and 32-bit Linux Binary: rook-bugfix.tar.gz
• Windows Binary: rook-bugfix.zip

So, as I was watching these lovely videos over on the temple of the roguelike, I realized I had shipped GnomeSquad with the “FINAL DEPTH” set to 1. Needless to say, this makes the game quite short!

So, I put out a fixed version that has the final depth set to 5 as intended (for now). Of course you can also set this number to whatever you want. Try 10! Without more balance testing 5 seemed about right to me, though.

This “final2″ version also fixes the annoying ‘faith’ bridge level that you see in the video.

Thanks to temple of the roguelike and whomever made those videos though, they are great so far!

I’ve already used it to find a few bugs.

Also, note to self… after all the monsters are dead let the player walk around without worrying about action points. Hah!

New version can be found on my site here.