That was my second jam with my brother Paul, but the first official one. 7DRL is a 21 years old gamejam, you have 7 days to ship a polished game that respects the traditional art of roguelikes. We started on March 3rd and finished on March 8th.

We’re astosnished because we actually managed to make a game that is actually fun to play, at least for us.

It’s not perfect (“of course it’s a gamejam”) and it was quite a demanding work, but we did non fail or drop out. We did not have any arguments either, which is something worth noting when it comes to working with family 😉

What went good

Our idea is, I believe, pretty cool. Battletech x Vector Racer, but it’s a roguelike.

We took the basics of roguelikes and tactical games, turn based combat, permadeath, procedural generation, and coupled them with an inertia system, allowing the player to experiment with physics while benefiting from long term strategic thinking.

The result just works in my opinion. Of course our implementation is quite simple – one weapon, one kind of enemy – but you can crash into walls or holes if you do not manage your mech’s velocity properly. And that is the thing I like the most ! When it is your turn to play and you have no choice but to suffer the consequences of your previous moves and hit the rocks in front of you at full speed, even if you have unlimited time before acting and think about how you will get out of this.

What’s not perfect

2D or 3D? The map was flat, of course. But when it comes to art, we both come from different worlds, and we ended up doing a kind of mashup that might not work entirely. My brother is a 3D artist and clearly our gameplay would be much better with a full 3D implementation. But 3D is more demanding for development, especially when the lead developer (me) has no experience with it.

Because of the jam’s scope, and because a huge procedural map is not something you can improvise in 3D, we had to switch to a manageable 2D tileset, something I am used to. For this reason, we had to opt for a top down view.

The characters and bonuses, though, are 3D rendered. We kind of managed to make 3D and 2D work together by using a sort of “flat design” style, and even though the models are not that appealing in a top down view, Paul gave the whole thing a super cool arcadey feeling by spicing it up with very cool FX and animations, and, of course, this amazing UI.

“I always loved those very old games that have a super detailed and gorgeous UI while the gameplay itself looked like shit“, he said.

We also did nice work with the sound FX and a tiny music loop that just nails the atmosphere.

Is this a prototype ?

The gamejam says the game has to be somehow polished and not be a prototype. Is our game a prototype ? We could say “no, it’s a full game”, but I’m not sure TBH : that will be to the 7DRL team to judge.

We really polished the UI / tutorial / debugging / balance and progression, we cared a lot about details, and we believe the experience there is a real standalone that you can play from start to end without any “work in progress” feel : it’s a complete and refined package. In that sense, I feel it’s not a prototype, it’s a full game !

It’s just that the concept looks so good for me, I can easily imagine that some day we’ll want to upgrade it. Maybe switch to full 3D to experience a better angle of those “turn-based physics” , and of course add a lot of content, like weapons (I’d love to draw inspiration from all the Battletech arsenal), maps and missions variety, types of ennemies, it feels unlimited when it comes to upgrade the concept.

But before that, we’ll have to rest a bit : even if we didn’t exactly did extra hours, it was quite demanding … So now, we’ll just wait and see what happens 🙂

Feel free to play this version on itch.io (windows only)

(and of course, any feedback is more than welcome)