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[Mobbstar]

The Seven-Day-RogueLike gamejam (7DRL) is a yearly week-long event when hundreds of people get together (or work alone) to make short games.  Click here for the official description on itch.io

This year has resulted in 239 entries.

I've seen many individual posts about entries of previous years, but never a thread about the gamejam as a whole.  So here we go!

Did you participate in 7DRL or would like to?  I did and it was fun, if only for working with talented friends and getting a Minimum Viable Roguelike against all odds.

Seen any interesting entries?  Are there other jams like this?

[Robsoie]

wow 239 this year ! Rather impressive

Amongst the bunch i spotted this "One Step Behind You"
https://itch.io/jam/7drl-challenge-2023/rate/1965013
https://dragonxvi.itch.io/one-step-behind-you-7drl-2023

that immediately reminded me of the old test/experiment at a ThiefRL
https://mcneja.github.io/thiefrl/index.html
https://mcneja.github.io/thiefrl2-web/index.html
that i found had tons of potential if moved toward more procedural stuff.

And after a couple of (failure) playthrough this "One Step Behind You" is really good and manage to implement a lot of what i hoped Thief RL would get one day.
Excellent !
 

[EuchreJack]

Several indy games had their start as 7DRL entries.

[Iduno]

Lurk, Leap, Loot looks good, and I've heard Mines Sweeper is a cool idea. I'll have to try some of these out. I'm curious if anyone's tried the card games.

Please let us know if any are particularly good or bad.

[Robsoie]

Tried that "Lurk, Leap, Loot" , it's from the same author as ThiefRL2 (and feels like an upgrade to it)

"One Step Behind You" is a lot of fun, but it can be very very hard, i haven't managed yet to complete a mission often getting close but i wish i had a couple more sleep arrows.

[Iduno]

Yeah, I can get to mansion 6 in Lurk, Leap, Loot consistently, then die about halfway through. Seems like a fun concept.

Mines Sweeper seems almost entirely luck.

I'm not sure I understood ASCII survivor, but I was able to buy more ammo twice, and couldn't afford to heal.

One Step Behind You is tough, but it doesn't quite feel unfair. Learning that you can knock out guards (hopefully out of sight) by walking into them helps.

Cave Runner is interesting, but simple.

[Robsoie]

You could knock them out ?
I've been trying my best to avoid walking into them (thinking only that lonely sleep arrow could take one out) even when they had their back turned (though stealing keys or money from their pockets) .

That changes everything , going to have a lot of fun knock-outing those guards

edit : yes , finally got two on a row done !

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Iduno]

https://itch.io/jam/7drl-challenge-2023/rate/1953543

Yeah, now that's the type of idea I like to see. Mario Kart Roguelike.

https://heckruler.itch.io/cyandreams

This one got too ambitious, but I want to see what it's like completed.

Edit: I also tried Firefighter in Hell. I lost during the first fight but I learned: fights are real-time. Sometimes cards come back to your hand, and I assume playing them does something.

[Mobbstar]

Rogue Coffee is decent for playing while listening to podcasts, though be warned it requires some short term memory for the orders.

[Iduno]

Trying a few more in our last few hours of voting.

I don't think a single one of the card-based games was quite working right, so they must be more complicated than people expected. My favorite was the one about delving as deep as possible, even though it's real repetitive. I ended up "losing" because you can't move onto water (blue) tiles, and I spawned in the middle of the water, completely surrounded. Firefighter in Hell might be a good game with instructions and something showing an effect from playing cards, but the real-time playstyle means you have about 30 seconds to figure out how the entire game works without any context clues before you die.

Decker looks promising, but I can't figure out how I'm supposed to proceed. Load up your hammer (attack) immediately, walk onto the log-in port, which creates an alarm and brings enemies, survive until the alarm clears (I didn't see an alarm status anywhere, but sometimes I saw a message that the alarm cleared). Then you get a user authorization token to open low-end doors, which you also need to load. Then sometimes you get lucky and find a higher-access user token, and sometimes you don't. You can attack doors to open them, but that creates an alarm, which brings enemies and invalidates your user token, and all of the doors around you shut so you can't get back to where you were. I *think* you're supposed to wander around until you have a good guess where to go, smash the doors, hit all 3 systems (also hoping to successfully break those doors and guess the correct direction before you're killed), and log out before you're caught. But your odds of success at the beginning are around 0. It's entirely possible I'm missing something.

[Mobbstar]

Trying a few more in our last few hours of voting.

According to the big counter, voting is still popssible during all of April.  Where says otherwise?

Despite the uninspired appearance, CaveRunner has a solid gameplay loop.

[Frumple]

Decker looks promising,

... this confused the hell out of me, because there's another roguelike with that exact same name and premise that predates it by literal decades (it released in '02). I probably spent dozens of hours playing the old one over the years, it was pretty engaging, especially around the period it released.

[NewOutlook]

Decker looks promising, but I can't figure out how I'm supposed to proceed. Load up your hammer (attack) immediately, walk onto the log-in port, which creates an alarm and brings enemies, survive until the alarm clears (I didn't see an alarm status anywhere, but sometimes I saw a message that the alarm cleared). Then you get a user authorization token to open low-end doors, which you also need to load. Then sometimes you get lucky and find a higher-access user token, and sometimes you don't. You can attack doors to open them, but that creates an alarm, which brings enemies and invalidates your user token, and all of the doors around you shut so you can't get back to where you were. I *think* you're supposed to wander around until you have a good guess where to go, smash the doors, hit all 3 systems (also hoping to successfully break those doors and guess the correct direction before you're killed), and log out before you're caught. But your odds of success at the beginning are around 0. It's entirely possible I'm missing something.

Hey, I came across this thread and thought I'd chime in as the creator of the game. There are a few things you might be missing: you don't need to wait for alarms to clear, you just need to wait for your hack to complete. This occurs much sooner than the alarm clear, so if you're waiting for the alarm to clear you're probably expending resources fighting enemies that you don't need to fight. Also, an alarm only invalidates access tokens that are currently running, so you can stockpile extra tokens in your inventory for the return trip.

For more general strategic tips: you can skip hacking the kernel if you don't think you have enough resources to do so and then get back to the syslog. It's also not too bad to only hack the financial port in the first system and deal with the heat later. You don't technically need to hack the Login port at all (I personally do though some players prefer just breaking a wall and grabbing a token elsewhere). As as a general tip, since the kernel, system log, and special port are the only rooms you can't access with a user token, you can pretty well figure out where they are by looking for ICE walls that a user token doesn't allow you to pass. If you end up running into the syslog port before you'd like, you can often just run away from it instead of fighting. In my runs I've consistently done okay on the first system, though I've not always managed to hack all three ports.

[Iduno]

Ah, thank you. I'll try with those tips.

I'm also pretty sure I was going to make a comparison to the other Decker roguelike, but didn't? The original felt like a good game, but *way* too long. The ~10 runs thing in this game seems better.

[Frumple]

The older one didn't have a win condition, iirc (or if it did, you could just keep going), just a (very difficult to actually occur) lose one. Was basically meant to just be played until you got tired of it, then maybe come back some other day for a few runs, or whatever. It was a different sort of design than this newer one, more sandbox-y. Better or worse probably falls more on taste on that front, heh.