v0.1.0: My first 7DRL submission!

My first 7DRL submission! It was a fun week with a lot of learning. 

This is an alpha release, and the game is under active development! Certain systems are disabled due to bugs in the browser-only version of the game but hopefully will be fixed in the coming days (after 7DRL 2022 has ended).

You are the pet

I love NetHack, and I especially love using pets, so I had a dream of a NetHack variant where YOU are the pet. You start as an innocent kitten, pony, or little dog, but can grow up to be whatever you want. There is a "catch [th]em all" aspect to unlocking new starting pet abilities -- will you be able to survive the hardcore "grid bug" mode?

Inspiration, meet Reality...

In reality I only implemented the first dungeon level, full of grid bugs and a single pancake which you can't pick up because I had to disable my inventory system due to a bug in the WASM build. But, I have built a pretty robust ECS that I feel good about building on in the future, and these are bugs which I will squash in the coming days after 7DRL has ended.

PLEASE follow me here to receive updates as I continue development. I am excited to keep working on this project, and sharing code, learnings and new features with the community. The end goal of this is not to build Yet Another NetHack Variant, but to build an entirely new game that is worth playing on its own merits. 

I didn't accomplish that during 7DRL, so what did I accomplish?

Features accomplished during 7DRL

• ECS running systems for Action, Behavior, Advancement, Combat, Health, Interaction, Inventory, PlayerInput, Rendering, Spawning and Visibility, and supporting a variety of composable components such as Brain, Vision, Equipment
  • Note: several of these systems are disabled in the browser build and I haven't released the downloadable game yet (soon!)
• Randomized level generation using BSP algorithm
• Secret terrain such as doors
• Message console
• Field of view calculation for players and monsters
• Character advancement a.k.a. Growing up
• Combat, including different wieldable equipment (and monster attacks such as bites and claws)
• WebAssembly build/package (although this has issues, see below)

Known issues

I need to fix many issues but I wanted to submit this game because it's the first time I've ever been able to take the time off of work to do a 7DRL, and I am proud that I was able to stick to it and upload something.

No menu or help screen

The controls in the 7DRL submission are 

• Arrow keys to move/attack
• S to search

Performance is slow

I apologize, I am using Ebiten (Golang) but building for WebAssembly and I had no idea the performance in the browser would be so dramatically different. 

Game is incomplete

There isn't much to do yet. I think a good 7DRL submission should at least be a finished game, and I acknowledge that as of Sunday evening, this is more like a prototype.

Certain systems are disabled

I had hoped this could be a browser game but Ebiten and WASM do not support certain basic golang libraries I was using and I didn't have time to rewrite the code, so I just disabled the systems that were failing. Most notably, the inventory (loot and equipment) system is completely shut off in the current build.

Next steps

• Fix severely degraded performance in the browser build of the game
• Upload downloadable builds of the game with existing systems re-enabled
• Implement menu system for Save/Load/New Game
• Finish implementing equipment. Did you know kittens can wear amulets?
• Implement monster AI using Goal-Oriented Action Planning. There's a reason I made everybody a grid bug.
• Write a devlog about one of these. Let me know if you have a preference!