Judgement Day

The results of 7DRL 2021 have been published, and RoboLike did OK, all things considered ("all things" being (a) this being my first real game jam (b) using an engine I'm still learning (c) writing a game in a genre I've not written before or (d) even play). It scored 2.67, which probably puts it at low mid-tier when the lowest score was 2.17 and the top score 3.78. But what I want to talk about is the good feedback I got from the judges (based on criteria of Completeness, Aesthetics, Fun, Innovation, Scope and Roguelikeness). Not necessarily positive, but good.

After submission I put in another couple of weeks part-time work to develop RoboLike into Quasidroid, which is pretty much what I wanted to submit. This means I've already addressed many of the points raised, which is good, and not others, which is interesting.

I've smushed the different judges comments together somewhat to make my responses more coherent.

Completeness: 2

Part of me thinks that's kind of generous, but I suspect 1s were being reserved for "Shouldn't have been submitted".

The Windows exe does not run (missing .pck file).

The Linux version had the same problem which I didn't spot until a couple of weeks after submission. I did upload a patch (which may or may not have been cheating) but obviously not in time.

I am able to play the web version, but it is very slow (~2-3 seconds for enemies to move). Key presses/clicks are not always registered, possibly because some enemies are still moving off-screen.

It's not just the web version. I've tried to make it a bit clearer in Quasidroid that enemies are moving off-screen, but it's still not great. But there's a point below which I think could help further.

Serious crashes that made it impossible to get past the first floor. Using ranged weapons seemed to occasionally completely freeze the entire game.

I know :( The freezes should all be fixed in Quasidroid, but they were a complete nightmare to chase down.

Aesthetics: 3

UI is clear and intuitive. Overall, no readability issues.

Excellent! I hope Quasidroid makes it even better, and not a step back.

The tileset is working well for this game. There are some issues with tile borders, with sometimes a 1 pixel gap between tile, but this is a 7DRL and I am sure it can be polished with a few more days of work.

It was indeed a few more days work to polish up the tileset.

The visible weapons on each robot was quite cool, and a welcome feature.

One of my design concerns was that I wasn't making it roguelike enough in having enemies with different characteristics having identical appearance. That the little I did manage got such a positive response is heartening.

Fun: 2

There is some potential here, but not too much fun yet because of the bugs and sometimes unresponsive interface.

Can't disagree with that.

There was a lot of cool stuff with the scavenging and gear collection, however there were a couple points that made the game very painful to play. 

Apart from the crashes (this is from a different judge).

Firstly, and most significantly, the animations take way too long, the characters just move way too slowly.

This is related to the unresponsive interface. It's just down to my choices for movement and animation speed, and the fact that all enemies are animated as if on-screen, whether they are or not. Quasidroid is slightly faster, but not much, so this is definitely a point for review.

Secondly, the damage system often resulted in any hit lowering your speed to 0, immediately immobilising you.

It took a lot of rebalancing work to try and iron this out, and it's still a bit more likely to happen now than I would like. One mitigation I've added is that if you're immobilised next to an access point or an immobilised enemy you can still crawl to it to recharge or try and scavenge a new drive respectively. And you can attack adjacent enemies in the hope of immobilising and scavenging them, but waiting for one to turn up is a bit tedious!

Thirdly, the weapon switching system was pretty tedious, cycling through all your weapons with a single button.

I added weapon switching through a menu to Quasidroid, and also did away with the irritating behaviour of it resetting your carried weapon at the start of each turn.

With these issues fixed, the game would be a lot more fun to play.

Watch this space, as they say.

Innovation: 3

The current version does not innovate much but the design document and the devlog show several interesting ideas that could lead to a neat game.

I hope Quasidroid delivers on this promise.

 Also, not many roguelikes have been written with the Godot engine, so kudos to the author for taking up this challenge !

Thanks. Godot's a really strong choice for 2/2.5D top-down, so this somewhat surprises me. Maybe it's the big issue that I ran into, that of overlaying a turn-based mechanic onto a real-time engine.

The part picking up system wasn't super innovative, as it doesn't come to much more than upgrading equipment, which is a common feature of many roguelikes.

I'm not convinced this is much better in Quasidroid unfortunately. There should be some sort of choice mechanism, making you decide between which weapons you're carrying, having to trade speed off against armour, and I've just not managed to figure it out. So you get to kit yourself out with every weapon you find, and everything else is on orthogonal upgrade paths.

The enemy AI however was quite cool, as they seemed to mostly execute fixed instruction chains with little reaction to their environment. This is quite a bit more interesting than the standard follow and hit model that most roguelikes employ, and I'd love to see this kind of AI style expanded upon.

Oh, wow, talk of making a necessity a virtue! (If you've not read the relevant pieces elsewhere in this devlog, the AI is basically "move in a straight line until you run into something interesting, then change direction" because I didn't have time to implement a fair "follow and hit".)

Scope: 3

What I expect from a 7DRL. Unfortunately I wasn't able to see a lot of the game due to the crashes, but it seemed like there was a reasonable amount of content.

I'll take that as a positive assessment, given that I had no idea what to expect from a 7DRL!

Roguelikeness: 3

This definitely passes as a roguelike.

As I've often said, I may not play roguelikes, but I have very strong feelings about what should pass. Having seen some of the other games getting 3s, I'm a bit disappointed with this score. Or maybe a bit disappointed that they didn't score lower in this category, given that although scoring is nominally out of 5, in practice it's out of 4.

Perhaps implementing a fog-of-war would help carry the feeling of discovery.

I'm still somewhat torn about the whole fog-of-war thing. I think the in-game justification for not having it is sound (not that it's spelled out anywhere), although the truth is that that's just a smoke-screen (hah!) for me not really knowing how to go about implementing it. What I should probably do is come back to the code after, what is it, 3 months and some? on other Godot projects and see if the problem looks any more tractable.

General review

Some bugs, and it needs more content, but definitely a good start for a roguelike. I hope the author will develop this further ! 

Reader, I did. And I will.

My plan now is that at some point in the next week or so I'll replace RoboLike with the current Quasidroid with the view of developing Quasidroid as a pure action game.