Day 3

Back to work today, so less time to work on my 7DRL, but I'm happy with progress so far. The plan today was to work on the UI and the level generation. Here are the fruits of those labours!



There's not much to say about level generation, right now it's very simplistic with cellular automata caves, or preset levels. I'm currently hoping to have at least three areas with distinct visuals and environments, but we'll see how that goes.

The bigger chunk of work today was adding the message log. Choosing to work with such a small grid means only having 21 characters of text per line, which makes rich descriptions tricky. Instead of having messages read across multiple lines, I've tried to use icons as much as possible. Where appropriate they are linked back to the map, so you can hover over an entity in the message log to see where they currently are in the map. I also added hover tooltips that explain the status icons and damage types.

Having the log makes it much easier to tell what just happened, especially in situations with multiple enemies, but it's still not quite enough, for me. I would like to put more visual emphasis on attacks and directions in the map too.

Tomorrow's job is figuring out how the levels fit together and adding some kind of system for acquiring new abilities and vestiges along the way. Hopefully by the end of tomorrow it'll be in a state where I can start play testing to get the balance right.