Save the Gold - 2024 7DRL Version

You’re a troll that’s amassed a grand fortune in gold. Trouble is word of your wealth has spread throughout the kingdom and now hordes of would be adventurers are storming your dungeon. Use your battle experience, magic spells, bombs, and projectiles to protect your gold stash at all costs!

Controls

Keys	Action
WASD QEZC	8 Way movement
Num Pad: 2 4 6 8	S, W, E, N
Num Pad: 1 3 7 9	SW, SE, NW, NE
5	Grab.
W, S	In a menu moves up and down.
ESC	Quits an open menu
.	Opens character progression for spending stat points
Q	Quits the menu screens
I	Opens the inventory
V	Opens the message log
,	Opens the main menu
G	Picks up items
J K	Moves selector up and down in a menu
ENTER	Selects an item in a menu

Placing traps

After placing a bomb it will trigger an explosion when stepped on. Damage is caused in a radius around the bomb.  Any game entity that steps on a tile with a bomb will trigger it, including the player!

Projectiles will fire a shot at a single closest enemy each turn. 

Once bombs and projectiles are placed don’t pick them up because you won’t be able to place them again. Known bug. 

Gold

Don’t pick up the gold. It’ll drive you crazy. 

The game ends when an enemy picks up the gold and carrys it to the exit. 

Waves

Each wave spawn places enemies and items in random rooms. Expect the starting room. 

About the game and development

This is the first game I’ve finished in years. At least something that’s playable as is. Even if I consider it incomplete it’s still a long way beyond anything I ever built so I’m super happy to have gotten as far as I did. 

Had a lot of fun making this. I used an existing engine I have as a base to work from and modified it accordingly. There’s no sound since I judged it as a nice to have for the game and focused on implementing gameplay mechanics. I know I shouldn’t build my own engine for this kind of thing but honestly I wouldn’t have gotten as far in Godot or unity since I’ve never made anything in them. At least with my own engine I know how things are working and connected. I did use libtcod for a few things so shout out for that epic code base. 

I’d like to keep working on this. I think it’d be quite fun with some more balance and extra mechanics. Add some animation and sound and it’ll have a whole new dynamic so after this I will slow down and take a bit more time with it. 

Bugs

As far as bugs go there’s a few so watch out for them. Picking up the gold attaches the runners AI to the player so you can no longer control the player. The player starts jumping in random directions. 

You can pick up triggerables (projectiles and bombs) but you can no longer place them from your inventory. I need to prevent the player from picking them up. 

I dumbed down the AI a little too much I think. So they wander around a bit too much for my liking. They can also see the gold and exit through walls which is annoying but also speeds up the game. They pick a target to walk to from the map at random and nice they get there they just pick a new random spot. I’d like to make this a bit smarter so they at least continue in the same direction. 

Other ideas

I toyed with the idea of allowing to spwan or recruit aids for the player that wander around and attack enemies. But I felt this would make it a little too rts like. I also thought about this mechanic could have 1 very strong enemy that comes and uses lots of resources to destroy to mimic more the idea of defending your dungeon against a single hero. You use a lot of resources to destroy the enemy but there are less of them to track down. 

Anyway that’s my entry to 7drl 2024. Let me know what you think about it, where it can be improved and what features you’d like to see.