Rough Patch
Day 4 had big plans, but ended up pretty rough. I’ve been working on a few real problems in my day job, and I just didn’t feel the motivation that had been carrying me through the start of the project. I got a lot more playing of Apex Legends done than I did work on #7DRL, but I’m feeling a ton better today!
Moving On
Today, having prototyped a power system on day 4, I’m going to expand it to apply to all of the buildings. I also need to add the ability for players to deposit materials that are in their inventory — this is how I expect players to power their generators early on, and how they can fill in the gaps where they haven’t built conveyor belts yet. Rather than explicit power lines, I’m going to create power poles which automatically link together. The whole system is going to be a bit rudimentary compared to peers in the genre, but I think I’d rather spend time on the things that differentiate.
To that end, I’m going to add these features today:
- New resource: Copper
- New building: Assembler (edit: skipping this)
- New building: Pylon (power hub)
- New manufactured resource: Research (edit: skipping this)
- New ability: Deposit inventory
In place of Assemblers and Research, I’m going to eat the frog and do multi-tile buildings.
I think that should probably take me the whole time I have available. It’s Wednesday, which means I should start thinking about what it’s even possible to cram in before Saturday morning; it’s looking like I might not finish, which would be a shame.
Before we can call this a finished game, we still have a lot of the things listed from the previous devlog:
- Win condition
- Tech tree
- More interesting maps (currently not much of a challenge, and I think the small size hurts the experience)
- Building and resource variants
- Multi-tile buildings
I guess my strategy will be to finish the most impactful things by Friday night, then spend the night doing polish and deployment. I’ll make an honest assessment on Saturday as to whether I feel it’s “finished,” but no matter how it shakes out I’m pretty happy with my progress so far, and think I’ll have (at minimum) a solid foundation to build on.
As always, you can check out all of my updates on Twitter for a closer look at the game!
P.S. here’s a bonus picture of my dog since I don’t have a screenshot today:
