Four p.m.

I'd say at the moment I appear to be ahead of schedule, which is good because today is really my only full day to work on this.

I've got the program drawing levels, creating rodney, interpreting keystrokes, and letting Rodney run around the level.

Have not done stairs or messages yet, those need to get done today, but I've got lots of time left.

Three Hours In

Looks like so far there are 6 participants in this years 7DRL, incuding myself. Seems like a smallish number. Maybe more are yet to join.

Coding is going well so far. I've put in about 3 hours of work, and I have a bunch of the infrastructure, and I am successfully drawing levels. Of course, those levels are empty. The next step is to create Rodney and make it so he can walk around those levels.

Gentlemen, Start Your IDEs!

6:30 a.m. on Saturday, and I'm awake. It's not a kayak trip, so it must be a 7 day roguelike. Oh, maybe I'm not all that awake after all. In a few minutes, I will post my starting message and I will create my first file.

Last night I figured out what all the monsters would be. I'm not going to post it here because I don't want to spoil it for you.

Oh, a Design Would be Nice

Forty-Five minutes until I can start coding. But I don't have to start at midnight; as I understand the rules, I can start any time on the tenth, and I have 168 hours from whenever I start.

Maybe I should use this evening to really spec out the game I'm going to write. I have it pretty well set in my head, but it's a hodgepodge of ideas.

I want to capture the essence of Rogue, but also be minimalist enough to be sure I can finish (let's face it, I probably have less than 60 hours in which to actually get work done).

I'm going to make the whole level map visible all the time; no dark rooms, no secret doors. The "stairway" won't show up until you are next to it, though.

Distance weapons and wands are kind of complex, but I don't think I can leave those out.

I could leave out armor. The original Rogue didn't have armor for a long time; folks at UCSC still loved playing it. Maybe I'll just push that out to the end, so I can skip it if I get behind.

I don't know if it's cheating to create the graphics files outside the 168 hour window. The rules are a bit vague. I think other 7drl's have used existing graphics, so it seems reasonable.

Still, I haven't created any, so I better get on it.

Captain's Log -- Supplemental

I figured out where I'm going to put the game.
It will be here

The Antepenultimate Hour

Holy Shamoley.

The contest begins in less than four hours.

There's still tons of stuff I haven't even started to figure out -- like what the monsters are going to be!

But I'm feeling good; ready to get started. It was an excellent day at work today. Managed to pump out an 18 page design spec in one day, and it's pretty darn good if I do say so myself. First day since sometime in November where I feel like I actually earned my pay.

I'm going to spend a little time this evening just getting all my ducks in a row -- making sure I've got the libraries I need, getting some graphics files, etc, and figuring out where I'm going to upload this to (probably babelsphere.com, since I let mindcountry.com lapse....)

Just want to make sure all my ducks are in a row so I can hit the ground coding at midnight (or in the morning if I'm too tired to code at midnght).

Seven Days Until...

Okay, the first stage in my trilogy/triathalon begins one week from today. I'll have the full day to work on this on Saturday, and most of Sunday (might see if I can get out of going to church). The rest of the week I'll only have spare time.

I may set some stuff up today -- no actual rogue programming of course, that would be cheating, but get together all the javascript libraries and exising non-rogue-specific code that I'm going to use. Also map out a timeline for the development. Saturday will be the most important day.

For the game, I think I want to go with the different-evironment-each-day plan, though I don't think I'll have enough time to really represent it graphically. Here's a proposal for each quest's environment and magic item
Day 1: Cave -- wand of mercury
Day 2: Forest -- potion of venus
Day 3: Desert -- key of mars
Day 4: Castle -- boots of jupiter
Day 5: Islands -- amulet of neptune
Day 6: Under water -- dog tags of pluto
Day 7: dream world/sky -- mirror of saturn

or something. Needs work. Well, I've got a week....

I think I will leave out rings, food, and gold, just to reduce the scope of the effort...


Here's a straw man development plan:
Saturday: map, levels, rodney, keyboard input, movement, stairs, messages
Sunday: pack/inventory, basic monsters
Monday: hand-to-hand weapons, armor, more monsters
Tuesday: wands & staves. more monsters
Wednesday: potions and scrolls, save & restore game
Thursday: distance weapons, amulets
Friday: transitions, intro, clean-up, testing

Maybe I should download and play some other seven day roguelikes to have a look at what is out there, huh?

All right, I'll do that, and let you know how it goes.