2017 7DRL, PokemonRL…. FAILURE?

Alright… this year I just couldn’t make it. You can play the current version here if you want to take a look tho.

(Edit: Later on I decided the game was worth considering as a Finished entry, even if didn’t meet my whole expectations)

I made so many mistakes during the challenge that it seems I deliberately ignored every single piece of my own advise:

• I created an almost complete roguelike engine from scratch instead of creating something lighter.
• I didn’t have a clear goal and I spent too much time wondering what to do and switching plans.
• I aimed blindly for an overwhelmingly big scope and didn’t think on an initial increment.
• I didn’t make time to playtest the game nor gathered playtesters for the task.
• I worked alone instead of building a team.
• I didn’t have a plan!

And finally, the biggest mistake I made was not devoting enough time to add quality content to the game (a critical step of which Jeff Lait, another veteran 7DRL warrior, has warned about time and time again). This was basically what caused me to consider this a failure… I worked a lot on it, and it’s actually interesting, playable and it has a winning condition and some nice mechanics. There’s a pretty awesome empty cocoon which will require a lot of work to fill in order to provide a fun experience.

Sum all the mistakes above, and add up the “real life excuses” (Lost a day recovering from my trip to California and almost 2 full days in the release of Ananias 2.2, and it wasn’t an easy week at the office…).

I may have been able to pull a mediocre “successful” release if I had neglected my family even more, but I feel better I could spend some time with them and bring them some comfort in times of conflict. 

Enough crying… on the plus side, I managed to:

• Create an interesting procedural generator for pokemon-like worlds.
• Adapt elements from the widely known Pokemon universe into a roguelike format.
• Create a simple command set, a friendly UI for new players.
• Create a Javascript roguelike template (“JSBoilerRL”) anyone can use to create their own roguelike (I’ll have to write a tutorial for that)

And probably for the first time I feel good about the source code of the game! it’s mostly clean, readable and extensible. It’s now open source… I’ll come back to it soon if enough people cares about it, to make a proper first stable release.

One of the think I liked the most is how I made tall grass work in the “route” maps… you have to dive into it in order to find pokemon 🙂

In any case, here’s a gameplay video of PokemonRL, enjoy!

Here’s what I managed to do in day 7

• Add Power Points to skills
• Add Pokemon center to recover all HP and PP
• Add Lab building to pick starter pokemon
• Allow giving up on gym battles
• Pokemon level up, learn new skills, evolve
• Select random town names
• Allow winning by getting 8 badges
• Add inventory limit