Day 1 - Unpaid afterhours

The plan: A menial day job simulator where you pursue rogueish metagoals while trying not to get fired. Or should I say villainous metagoals?

At the end of an exhausting day I finally downloaded and loaded Godot 4.0 a few minutes before midnight, the start time agreed with my reoccurring partner in corporate crime, Seilburg. It crashed. Trying again, it crashed or froze every time. I was hoping to delay starting (again), but no, he'd already started!

Of course I hadn't bothered to learn or test the new engine (released just 3 days earlier) beforehand. I'd been hoping to use the OHRRPGCE instead, but the critical engine features I wanted are still unfinished.

The crashes seemed to be caused by a broken Mesa (OpenGL/Vulkan) install, and luckily I do a poor job maintaining my multilib Linux distro, so I actually have two Mesas which are different versions. So a 32-bit build of Godot worked! Only one hour wasted.

Next I tried porting my favourite utility code and other code from last year's 7DRL to the new engine. The changes needed were small but it took me hours to get my footing. I oft think of John Carmack reputedly always writing each of his (earlier) games from scratch instead of trying to reuse code. I used to think this was crazy, but I see the wisdom of it today. By reusing code from one game to another (this is our 5th 7DRL, always built on the previous) I hoped the code would improve over time, but in fact it's prevented me from finding better solutions and accumulated cruft. This time I've reused much less, and spent hours of the first day trying to write clean code or improve what I have.

After seeing dawn and getting some sleep, by the end of the day I had a message system, turn queue, wandering NPCs and basic player movement, while Seilburg focused on UI and graphics. I thought this was our best Day 1 yet, but it turns out last year we had far more by the end of the day. Suddenly I'm worried.