7DRL Postmortem

So, I figured that I should take a few minutes and do a brief postmortem of the week, both for my own reflection and the enjoyment of any of you out there who are actually reading this.  :-)

First off, a few things went well.  I did end up with a playable game at the end of the week.  It has a beginning and an end, a lose condition and a win condition.  It has some challenges.  It is even fun (at least for me).  This is the first game that I have finished and given to the public to enjoy, and it is a really good feeling.  I'm also reasonably satisfied with the amount of time that I was able to spend working on the challenge during the week.  I didn't take any time off work, but I did spend every evening and most of the weekends working on it.  It did come down to a really close deadline at the end of the week, but I was very blessed by my wife being very supportive and helping me to stay focused and on track for this week as much as possible.  It is an especial blessing as we are moving at the end of the month, and we have already been starting on the preparations for that.  That basically went on pause for the week, and I am thankful that I was able to take the opportunity to participate in the challenge.

Of course, not everything went as well as I would have liked.  The biggest is something that I understand is common to most 7drls, which is that the game isn't as polished as I was hoping.  That is obvious in everything from the fact that messages still use a creature type name rather than a nice creature name, to the fact that the balance of the spells you find isn't what I would like.  The original idea was that most of the spells you find would be mostly useless at first, at least in terms of being useful in combat, and you instead have to use them to learn the runes that you will combine into actually useful spells.  That is very successful in some cases - Self Immolation being my personal favorite (it does exactly what it says on the tin) - but not in every case.  Most of the combat spells you learn won't need to be changed at all, which is something that I had hoped to adjust but never had the time to get back to.  I'm also dissappointed that I never had the chance to add the scoring system, which I had thought would really add to the replayability of the game.

I think that the issue of not enough polish derives in part from the issue of wasting too much time early in the week on things like the Dijkstra map implementation.  That was about a day an a half worth of time that I never got back, although it did make the monster AI very easy to implement.  It also took a very long time to get the spells and runes working properly, and I never had enough time to make the fancy spell creation screen that I was imagining.

Overall, though, I had a blast during the week, and I am really looking forwards to seeing what the community thinks of the game.  I do intend to spend some more time adding some of the polish that I didn't have time to get to, so that I can make it a good game before I move on to use the code base and create a more fully featured sequel.  I had a number of additional spell effects that I was hoping to get to add, ranging from animating enemy corpses to charming opponents, mapping the level, and enabling creative buffs/debuffs.  I guess that it only makes sense that the more advanced runes will be kept from the entry exam, and will have to wait for Spellforger 2: Graduation Exam.  :-)