Intro

Once again I have completed a 7 Day Roguelike project. This is my 8th year in a row. I love doing 7DRL every year, I've mostly fallen off doing other game jams because of the amount of energy and focus required to do a good job - one a year is about right and 7DRL has been that one for quite a few years now. On my Itch page you can see all my past 7DRL entries.

This year, due to poor planning of my holiday allowance for the year, I worked 2 days during the week so it was really closer to 5DRL for me. I still felt that I managed to get a good amount done. Working on 7DRL can be quite intense for me so weirdly going to work kind of felt like a break despite the fact I also write code at work.

The Project

This year I wasn't sure what I wanted to make so I polled my friends on Discord to pick from a few "classic" themes - pirates, wild west, samurai. Pirates won by a significant margin so I went with that.

The pirate theme inspired me to want to focus on a few things this year:

• Sailing and traversal by boat vs on foot
• Digging up buried treasure, X marks the spot

These ideas led me on to wanting to focus more on generating a world as a persistent space (as opposed to just a dungeon from a lot of my past projects) and putting a bit more of a narrative than the classic "go to the end and get the mcguffin of yendor".

The Good

I was fairly happy with how the world generation turned out. I was happy with the "Windwaker" style world map sliced up into grid squares with a Point of Interest in each one (all more or less similar islands in practice). I used a cellular automata for generating the base terrain on each island, which is a technique I had previously used in Hostile Skies in quite a superficial role. I also had a lot of fun with generating island names based on a simple "[prefix][suffix] [noun]" scheme, which adds a lot of life into the world IMO.

I managed to get a good amount of piratey stuff in the game. I was quite happy with the "looking for buried treasure" mechanic based around placing random "points of interest" on the islands and then picking a spot near them for the treasure.

I also got a reasonable amount of narrative in - nothing world shattering but the flow of

• wake up on an island and find your stuff
• visit town for info
• find a treasure on an uninhabited island
• find a treasure on a normal island with some procgen stuff on it
• go to the ending island/mini dungeon

I think is enough to make it feel like a complete game.

From a technical perspective the game is fairly solid. I have had a few minor bugs reported but nothing really game breaking I think.

The Bad

Amount of content - it always feels to me like you need quite a lot of options for random content to really make a roguelike feel rewarding to replay multiple times and it's hard to get that in for a jam. I did get a bit of variety in but not loads

Not much reason to stray off the critical path - you can really just beeline to the end following the "main quest" and not see much outside of that. There isn't much challenge to motivate looking for money for upgrades. I'm not sure how many people will bother to follow any of the randomised treasure maps sprinkled around or see more than one or two random islands.

Shallow Combat - I didn't put much work into the combat system outside of the one major element of the guns with limited ammo. Tactical possibilities are limited and enemies aren't much different outside of where they move and whether they start hostile.

No gameplay in the "sailing layer" - the world map is really just for getting from island to island, there's no gameplay to sailing, no ship battles or anything else I could imagine. Adding some difficulty/gameplay to getting between islands would add a lot of dynamism to the game I think.

The Future

At the very least I would like to put up a post-jam patch which fixes the issues found by players. Actually expanding the game with more content and features is also a possibility although historically I haven't ever followed up much on my jam projects. I do feel that there's something in this game that I would like to put some more work into, I had fun building out the world a bit this time and it would be nice to make it into a better game with a more interesting world on top of that.