Before jumping in to my first day of work for my first 7DRL (7 day roguelike) challenge, and I‘m ready to quit. I’d been mulling over an idea for a while that I thought was pretty novel. As soon as pen hit paper, however, I realized that not only was it going to be pretty difficult to accomplish, but it deviated pretty strongly from the definition of a roguelike.
The idea has been rolling around in my head for a few days. I’ve decided I’d rather pursue something I’m interested in than finish a mediocre idea.
In short, I’m going to apply roguelike concepts to the automation genre in order to make an accessible, replayable, and challenging factory game. Finally, I’m going to do it all in a browser so that the barrier to entry is as low as possible
Since prep work is allowed, I’d started getting my developer workspace ready about a week ago. I set up a Git repository, made sure NPM was up-to-date, did a tutorial for rot.js, the library I plan to use. This has turned out to be invaluable — nothing kills the initial excitement of building like trudging through that foundational work.
As of now, I’ve written a few basic building types — an excavator, a loader, and a conveyor belt. They have sprites that change depending on their orientation, and will soon visually convey their inventories. In addition, I have a basic real-time game engine that will allow players to easily speed up and slow down the simulation.
I hope you’ll follow along as I complete this journey, and that you’re able to learn a little something about game development in the process!
