Day 1 - Memories

So here we are. It's been a year since I've tried to properly flex my Godot and game development muscles. Despite the fact they've atrophied, I've made reasonable progress for the first day. As ever, only a fraction of what we wanted to do was achieved - but if I got everything done on schedule, how would I be able to have my customary last-minute panics?

This instalment in the devlog is going to be a bit unusual: naturally I'll be chronicling my daily progress, but I'm also going to write a quick post-mortem for the entry we submitted last year, Slumber. I'm starting with that.

Slumber - a (slightly) esoteric 7DRL: Port-mortem

The primary ambition for Slumber was not to be found in the features that were cut (sadly, of which there were many), but was engrained in the DNA of the idea. You see, Slumber wasn't about excavations and spelunking, it was about memory and identity. Unfortunately, tackling this theme in the way that we hoped to, by distancing the player from traditional roguelike mechanics and instead focusing on excavating artefacts was so grossly out of scope that it verged on the absurd. Even though the version of Slumber that we released sits at some distance from what we hashed out in the design doc we wrote for it, I stand by the idea, and it served excellently to prepare us for our next overly-ambitious project. What we tried to achieve, though unfortunately didn't really materialise, was that the gameplay should serve the themes of the game, so that they're closely interlinked and support each other. This is something which we've kept in mind for Portlligat.

One part of the Slumber development progress which was a tremendous success was the tooling we used to assist in producing assets. Tooling is something which I've invested (both in terms of time and a tiny bit of money) in over the past year, and has greatly aided in the productivity and pleasure of creating graphical assets. Love your tools!

And with that short post-mortem (only a year late!), I now present the devlog proper for today:

Cards on the table:

• Create some data structures for the game (character stat blocks and attributes, some code for items, player class and basic map movement);

• Write code for objects that reside on the game map;

• Message display and message log;

• Some tileset graphics.

What did I actually do? A bit more than expected, probably a bit less than hoped:

• Created the stat block code, and the various types to manage stats, including experience accrual and levelling-up;

• Implemented the basic camera and added a little support functionality;

• Created some basic code for dealing with items;

• Wrote some code to support the procedural generation of creatures and creature archetypes;

• Drew some graphics, some based on Kenny's excellent 1-bit Pack, some original;

• Started work on the GUI, which pretty much behaves as expected, but has no real functionality yet;

• Did some work on the title track.

I drew this little guy:

Tomorrow I will show off his big brother!

Things I'm doing tomorrow:

• Most of the cards lined up seem to be for my co-conspirator to do, so I guess I'll just read a book and watch some TV?

• Of course not! I'm going to start implementing the item crafting system. Exciting!

• I expect I'll also be producing lots more graphics, and writing bits and pieces of code as the need arises.

• And, naturally, I'll be writing and uploading the Day 0 devblog in addition to the day 2 devblog.

Onwards!