Finally Done

Well, this is it. My entry for the 2024 Seven Day Roguelike Game Jam. I've been wanting to join this specific jam for a while now, and I'm glad I finally got the chance to participate.

So, what is Outlast? There is a common phenomenon in the roguelike community of turning everything (video games, movies, board games) into a roguelike. That's why you have games like DoomRL and AliensRL, based on the famous video game Doom and famous movie Aliens. I was inspired by another game jam project released years ago by none other than the creator of Minecraft himself, Markus Persson. He joined the Ludum Dare game jam and produced the game Minicraft in 48 hours. It had an engaging Minecraft-like progression system, and had a procedurally generated world made up of several two dimensional layers.

Inspired by Minicraft (and the excellent game Forsaken Isle on Steam), I took it upon myself to turn the concept into a roguelike. What better way to test out the concept than by joining the 7DRL challenge? By assigning myself a deadline, I gained the motivation I needed to put my old ideas into action. The game translated better than I expected. The simple control scheme was mostly preserved (I added an extra button) and the inventory and crafting system are functionally identical. Moving from a real-time game to a turn-based one was a different beast. I eventually settled on a facing mechanic. A single tap from an arrow key turns the player to face that direction, and a tap in the direction the player was already facing would move them in that direction. Turning also happens to be a free action. Accidental turns happen a lot more during gameplay than I thought.

Something present in Outlast not present in the original Minicraft is a Field-of-View and per-tile lighting system. Roguelikes are well known for their Line-of-Sight and Field-of-View algorithms, and my roguelike adaption wouldn't have felt complete without blocking the player's sight from going through walls. Not to mention, it makes the game more difficult, and that's what roguelikes are known for, right? Once I added a FOV, I decided to go a step further and add an entire lighting system to the game. It was well worth it. The game is so much more interesting with it included. Unfortunately, due to the seven day deadline, it isn't very optimized, and blowing up a nuke (yes, there are nukes in the game) in the underworld will cause severe lag due to all the lighting updates made by flowing lava.

Programming Mob AI took far too long, eating up almost two whole days of my precious time. I am by no means experienced in this area, so I'm glad the enemies turned out as dangerous as they did. If you know their AIs inside and out (there isn't much to know) they can be easily cheesed, but their sheer numbers help to round that off a bit. Programming the AI of the Air Wizard took a while, and I'm still not satisfied with how he turned out. Depending on how he feels, the fight can be over within just a few rounds of you getting to the sky layer, or it could drag on a while as he hovers out in open space where you can't reach him, spawning annoying enemies to distract you.

When I first laid out the plan for this game, a save/load system wasn't in the list. Not only because roguelikes (and Outlast) feature permadeath, but because it would have taken away valuable development time. Once I started playtesting and realized that most runs of the game were going to run very long, it was too late to hack a functional save system into the horrible mess the codebase had become.

All that being said, I'm very proud of my work and where Outlast is right now. I really tried my best during this past week, and working on this project has been very exciting and motivating for me. I do currently have plans to refactor and revamp Outlast into a full-fledged product that receives regular updates, with better design decisions built into it from the ground up. If that is something you would like to see, please leave a comment and let me know what you liked about the game and what you didn't, so I can take it into my design considerations.

That's all for now!