Reviews from the 7DRL for Rogue Coder

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So The reviews are in for 7drl and although not massive success – I am happy with an average 1.61 (out of 3) allround score. Here are the three summaries of the game I entered in this years 7drl:

Rogue Coder

Trusty laptop by your side, you set forth on a prison break to free a fellow programmer. Friendly inmates will give you bits of syntax and the rest needs to be figured out for yourself. One of the first things you learn is connecting to objects in the level, and issuing commands to them – for example connecting to and turning on an elevator. Unfortunately there are only two types of object that can be interacted with in this way, and little gameplay beyond moving to the goal once you’ve worked out how activated/deactivated them. With work this game may be worth coming back to, but for now is sadly incomplete.

In rogue coder you literally have to code to survive. Meaning, you the player, not you the character. You need to learn the in-game scripting language to do stuff like unlock elevators and turn off lights. It’s exceedingly hard to learn all of this though, so if I were you and you want to try this game just source-dive into the javascript and hack things that way. Seems only appropriate for a hacking roguelike!

Programming is outlawed, programmers are in jail, and you need to free a particular one on level 4. Armed with a laptop, you dodge guards, make friends with prisoners, and mess with elevator locks and room lights (provided you can figure out the sparsely-documented Dominicscript). Not much roguelike gameplay, but provides the kind of puzzling fun that the Python Challenge does. Probably not fun to play without programming experience.

 

So there’s obviously still more to do but when you consider this was a very cramped weeks work (not sure how many hours but from memory not a lot of time during the week due to work and family commitments). Like always though, its important to use these reviews and learn from them. Like the video review – I have added lots of things to my todo  list for the next version of this game!!!!

Watching my videogame reviewed on Youtube

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The Game

So you may have noticed I entered the 7drl (7 day roguelike comp) this year – a comp to write a game in 7 days. It’s actually not a lot of time to write a game and given work and home commitments – its really really not very long. Anyway I wrote a crazy game called Rogue Coder using JS, HTML5 and MVC4. The end product is here www.domssite.com/roguecoder

The Review

So uberhunter is reviewing all games in the 7drl on youtube and he just reviewed roguecoder. It’s a fair stressful experience watching your game (warts and all) get a review from such a guy.

here it is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEaPH34DxxE

Lessons Learned

The value of a review like this is priceless. Its a great way to look at your game through the eyes of an independent and experienced player. It’s hard to watch at times because I keep thinking “I really wish I had fixed that bug”. It’s also hard to watch a review like this because you are not there to guide and advise, and you are not there to explain the things that you have in your head but never quite got the time to either fix or document . I think I have taken some a few important lessons:

1. Ensure core game play works (the bugs with the compiler actually stop the game from being playable).

2. Watch the way someone else plays the game and look at their actions and strategies to determine ways to make the game more playable, robust and enjoyable.

Whats next

V2 of course stay stay tuned  here in the next few weeks. Of course a big thank you to uberhunter for the review