Escorial
Friday, 12th March 2021 ◆ Corvid with new tiara (5) ◆ Comments (1) 7DRL Game jamsNow being without job, I want to enter a couple of game jams this year. My first submission is to 7DRL, a yearly jam in which the goal is to create a roguelike game in 7 days. My game, Escorial, is complete, and you can play it over at itch:
I'm really happy with the results, especially given I was only able to work on the game for 5 of the 7 days. The game is a Broughlike, that is following the style of the games of Michael Brough (who is probably the best game designer there is). (What is a Broughlike?) Go give it a play, and good luck. Warning: it is quite difficult to score highly...
Background
For the first two days of the jam, me and my boyfriend had a pre-planned trip to El Escorial, a town near where we live. The town is home to an impressive monastery which in the past served as the residence to the King of Spain. As a memento to that trip, I decided to base my submission (loosely) on that monastery.
Thoughts
On the whole, I'm really pleased with the game. Each level feels like a little puzzle: how can you unfurl and collect a banner, without taking any damage? The aim is usually to kill as few enemies as possible, and hightail it to the exit!
The scoring mechanic is a bit weird, and would feel more at home in a board game than a computer game. I tend to feel a bit frustrated that after playing for a good stint, I only manage to accumulate a tiny handful of points. That said, it's weird, and I like weird.
The major thing I wanted to include but didn't manage to are major secrets. I had planned secret levels, hidden dragons and collectible relics. Alas, I will have to wait for next year for that!
There is a lot more I could improve if I continued to work on the game, but I think I am happy to leave this one as it is for now. Give it a play and let me know what you think...
Tech
I've been struggling with finding a suitable framework for making games. I was finding LibGDX a bit clunky, and compiling to HTML5 and mobile is such a pain. I used this game jam to seriously try out a major contender: PIXI.js. As a framework, it already scores major brownie points with me because it uses the same API that Flash used to, back in the day.
I'd used it before, but I found the lack of strict typing a major setback. However, v5.0.0 (which came out in 2019) introduced type information for Typescript, so I thought it was worth giving that a go. And wow. Using Typescript was a dream. It has all the advantages which come with strict typing (autocompletion, avoiding stupid errors), but the deployment and testing is so quick.
![Escorial in development Escorial in development](/img/blog/78/nova.png)
Upon making changes in my editor, the game would auto-update immediately, thanks to webpack-dev-server.
I haven't tried deploying to mobile, yet, but the game runs well in the browser on mobile, so I don't see why it wouldn't work when packaged as an app too.
I will be sticking with PIXI.js + Typescript for all my game projects for a while. I'm thrilled to have found a framework which suits me so well, so regardless of how well Escorial turned out, this is an excellent result!
Mentions
I have been pleasantly surprised at how well people have taken to the game. This leads me to revise my previous thoughts of leaving the game alone. I will probably try to turn the game into a mobile app. Here are some of the mentions:
- Terry Cavanagh (of Super Hexagon fame) wrote a nice article about the game and recommended it on his blog
- The game was featured on the itch.io Youtube channel
- And one of the most exciting things to happen, Michael Brough himself even retweeted the game!
- The game was licensed non-exclusively by CoolMathGames
Comments
Very nice game. Do you have any plans to publish this game on iOS?