7DRL 2020 - Success!

My 2020 submission for the seven-day Roguelike challenge is complete! And it came in just about an hour under my deadline.

It is called Taraman Castle Oni Story -- or, if you prefer, タラマン城鬼物語.

I had a lot of stuff going on in my life during the 7DRL this year, and I knew about it going in, so I was deeply skeptical about whether or not to participate at all this year. But I was persuaded by a combination of inertia and the pure excitement to take a crack at this game concept-- I've had the underlying mechanical concepts for this game rolling around in my head for a long time now, and it's been sitting near the top of my "list of cool ideas that I could use for the 7DRL sometime" notes file, and this year there was nothing cooler above it on the list, because I did Precious Metal last year.

About a week beforehand, I started thinking about what it should look like visually, and played around in rexpaint a little to see if I could come up with a nice aesthetic. Somewhere along the line, I hit on this weird quasi-3/4-view look, and it just looked so pretty that I was instantly sold. But of course, getting it to work in-game was another matter entirely. Probably the first full day or two of the 7DRL period was spent just hacking up rot.js to get it to do the things I wanted it to do, and tinkering with the results to make sure it read nicely (for me anyway-- let me know if you think it's super unreadable and I need to tweak it a lot more.)

In the end, ironically, some of the main combat mechanics that inspired this game in the first place fell by the wayside, because I was going to have trouble figuring out how to integrate them into the world generation. That said, I am super pleased with the visuals of the whole thing, at least, and I got a lot of nice quality-of-life features in the game this year. I even got to play it for about two or three hours this morning to help me tweak numbers on all the weapons and monsters to try and balance it out better-- Still not 100% satisfied with that, but I'm at least comfortable that it's not a broken game. I will likely want to continue to tweak numbers for a while yet.