I recently ready a blog post called The Slow Application Development Methodology that got me thinking about what I enjoy about hobby roguelike development, but also some frustrating parts of dealing with my own limited productivity.
Here are some brief design development principles for my current project, in the hopes stating them publicly will help me stick to them. These principles come from experience over the course of many 7-Day Roguelike Challenges (both successes and failures) and most importantly, learning my own weaknesses.
- Make a game YOU want to play
- You are not building a roguelike engine
(no, seriously..) - Don’t reinvent the wheel (ROT.js is your friend)
- Work on small chunks at a time – no grandiose leaps into refactoring hell
- You really, really, really aren’t building a roguelike engine
- Aim for a solid ‘coffee break’ game worth of content.
- When you have something that’s not embarrassing to play, get some feedback from real users
- Expand core gameplay only after #6 is done
Looking to have #7 done by the end of this month.. we’ll see! In the meantime, here is some more gameplay. I have 4 working powers, and have completely rebuilt the menu system so that it is super-easy to drop in new interfaces. This is the kind of thing that is boring to code but will make future features so much easier to add.
