About

A Seven-​​Day Rogue­like (7DRL) is a rogue­like cre­ated in seven days. That is, the author stopped writ­ing code 168 hours after they started writ­ing code. A 7DRL can be cre­ated at any time dur­ing the year. How­ever, gen­eral agree­ment was reached that it would be fun to sched­ule a spe­cific week for a 7DRL Chal­lenge.[1]

What is a rogue­like game? The genre began with the game Rogue, which was cre­ated in the 1980s. Accord­ing to Wikipedia, rogue­likes are a sub-​​genre of role-​​playing video games, char­ac­terised by:

  1. ran­domi­sa­tion (for replayability),
  2. per­ma­nent death (once a player-​​character dies, the game can­not be restored at an ear­lier point), and
  3. turn-​​based movement

—although, of course, there are excep­tions to each of these prin­ci­ples in var­i­ous roguelikes.

For his­tor­i­cal and prac­ti­cal rea­sons, most rogue­likes depict the game world using ASCII “graph­ics,” although some newer rogue­likes use graph­i­cal tiles. Rogue­likes typ­i­cally involve dun­geon crawls, with many mon­sters, items, and envi­ron­men­tal features.

  1. See Jeff Lait’s email. []

15 thoughts on “About

  1. I really wanted to enter this year but I left it too late to brush up on my pro­gram­ming skills (it’s been ten years since I last programmed).

    I’m fol­low­ing it closely though and wish good luck to all who are enter­ing. I’m using the time dur­ing the con­test to try to start my own rogue­like, but I’m not for­mally enter­ing because I don’t have the skill or speed back yet. To tell you the truth I spent most of yes­ter­day research­ing the pros and cons of var­i­ous lan­guages and libraries. I almost wish the con­test man­dated a cer­tain lan­guage or library so I wouldn’t have the choice!

  2. I look at this as a rel­a­tively new(b) pro­gram­mer, and I start telling myself that “I dont know enough to even enter this year, but next year I’m givin’ you mo’nukkas a run for your money”.

    See you in 2013, and sorry I stole yer lootz. (pre-​​apology) ;)

  3. I want to cre­ate a stealth game about col­lect­ing trea­sures in a non-​​randomized dun­geon. The rogue­like aspects would be ran­dom­iza­tion of items and permadeath.

    Do you think it would elli­gi­ble as an entry?

  4. Pingback: Trixel Tuesday – Control, Hotline, Lion Heads, Tardis, Banana | Hex-Ray Studios

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