A few weeks ago I attempted the 2017 7DRL Challenge. I worked on a kaiju roguelike called Gigastomp. Inspired by the feel of classic Godzilla films I had some big plans.

To be fair to myself, I did finish off the week with something that can be technically called a game. You can win, you can lose, you can breathe energy beams, etc. But the end product feels unfinished, unbalanced, an unfun. It’s a nice tech demo and if this was my first year doing the challenge I might even count it as a success. But it’s just so far from where I want it to be.

I think what went wrong was I spent too much time debugging the game engine. First, I was experimenting with making multi-tile actors. I want these monsters to be big! But there was more to account for there than I expected. Experiments with animations and events that caused chain reactions of more animations also took a lot of time to debug. I think the takeaway for next year is to spend less time experimenting with technology so I have more time to experiment with gameplay.

Anyway, it’s not so fun yet but I’m going to continue to improve it. You can try it anyway if you want. At least it looks cool.