Nine Day Game, Day 0
As a learning exercise, we (@malexw and @ryanfox) have decided to take our 5 day reading week + 4 days of weekends and write a computer game. For me, writing a game is an itch I've wanted to scratch for a while. I've come close, most recently writing a quick but incomplete OpenGL game at a Hackathon last month with some software engineering students, but I've never completed a game that I would be willing to release.
There are a few requirements for this project:
- Time-boxed to 9 days. By midnight of Monday the 28th, we have to have something releaseable.
- It has to be fun. It's one thing to write an engine and create some assets, but it has to be worth playing.
- We want to learn. I want to write a proper game engine in openGL, and I'd like to strengthen my knowledge of game design, and some specific tools like git
We're both fans of roguelike games, so our game will take most of its influence from that genre. However, as the Seven Day Roguelike Challenges have shown, we need to limit our scope in order to have a solid, fun game. (Not that the 7DRL games are bad, but we're striving for as much quality as we can squeeze out of our nine days!)
To limit the scope, we've decided for now to focus on the character building aspect of roguelike games. That is, everything in the game is going to be about character customization, creation, and evolution. You'll still have the combat and dungeon-crawling fun of a traditional roguelike, but the goal is to create the ultimate character, and have fun doing it.
We started a game design doc, based on the recommendations of Brenda Brathwaite, the designer behind the Wizardry series of RPGs. Here is the state of our design doc at the end of Day 0: