GUM Post-Mortem

Landen decided to do the Godot Wild 78 Jam, and I helped out with some bugs & architecture.  We had a snow storm & a long weekend all at the same time, so Landen had a lot of time up front, where he mostly built the combat system. Conversely, the Saturday before it ended I had to do a lot of sitting around and waiting with my laptop, so i could clean up some rough edges and fix some bugs.

Here is the game if you would like to play it.

The game is a simple dungeon crawl with a novel battle system.  Most of the dungeon crawling is lifted right out of my Hobby roguelike, from map generation to navigation.

One thing that came together very fast is map generation.  I used my Map Generating library to make some generators for each level of the dungeon.  here they are:

• Level 1 is a straight forward roguelike map.  drop some rectangles, then connect them with axis-aligned halls.  Here's each "Preview" of the steps of a very simple dungeon like this, and a look at the steps that produce these.

• Level 2 does the same, with a cellular automatat steps to round out the sharp corners.  this also calls for fatter hallways, so the thin hallways don't get rounded out of existence.

• Level 3 & 4 do the same, but with slightly different numbers to account for larger maps.
• Level 5 does away with rooms entirely (since rooms allow players to "sneak by" enemies easier).  instead of axis-aligned connections, we connect the original shapes linearly, then discard the original shape distribution altogether.

Clearly the game has a surprisingly in-depth map generator. More in-depth than the game itself can actually shine light on - but that's the point. Map generation can be a multi-day task to achieve the bare minimum, so this tool is something I've built to (hugely) reduce that time for jams exactly like this one.

Ultimately we were both pretty toast by the end, and we had to submit a day early because of prior commitments. we sat down on Saturday night and spent a few hours tying up all the loose ends and doing a few balance passes.

• I think the game came out fine! I would love to have put some more feedback in - so its more obvious when you get hit or get critical hits. I also would love to have actually animated the units moving around on the dungeon map, but we ran out of time.