Emerald Woods – 2020 7DRL Challenge

I managed to finish another game for the 7DRL Challenge! you can play online here or here.

Emerald Woods is the farming and exploration roguelike I always wanted to make. It’s inspired by games like Harvest Moon / Stardew Valley, however with some big differences:

• You are alone: there is no town to buy things from, there are no other humans for you to buy with gifts.
• You can die off hunger and sickness, so you gotta be careful and plan.
• The map is procedural, you can roam the world and expand your horizons.
• Watering crops and “taking care” of animals is removed. I don’t want the game to feel like a chore.
• Related to it, the game doesn’t incentivize making a huge farm and getting a lot of money. It’s meant to be relaxing in certain way (even if you can die).
• There is no combat of any kind. If it ever gets implemented (I’m still not sure) it will be just hunting, no evil monsters trying to kill you.
• The setting of the game, or rather your character’s backstory, is up to you to decide.
• Crafting is freeform, you place tiles in the world using resources.
• …and of course, it uses a character-based display, a core design choice that supports most of the points above.

The 7DRL Challenge entry is already a complete game, even enjoyable for a bit. But I’m planning to continue development. I managed to invest around 40 hours of development (struggling with real life, as usual 🙂 ) and posted my daily devlog at this thread on itch.io. (Also archived here).

Highlights of the development included:

• The procedural generator, based on Cellular Automata, with “hollow” mountains to explore.
• Dynamic field of view (both radius and “color”) which looks especially good when entering caverns.

I had contributions from mapedorr and quietgecko on the art side of things. They did an amazing work with the environment music and sound effects, as well as some visual aspects such as the palette and characters to use.

Stay tuned for more news about the game! also if you want to send your ideas or bug reports, please use the community feature.