7DRL 2012 Ends!

7DRL, the 8th annual challenge to make a complete roguelike (aka dungeon crawler) game in just 7 days is over now.  There were no places or prizes awarded.  Possible e-fame and a sense of accomplishment were the only real prizes.

There still isn't an official tally of the total number of entries, winners and not-so-winners as announcements are still being made and some are crawling out of the woodworks.  However, Björn Ritzl has posted a nearly complete list of entries, successes and failures over at the Peeks and Pokes blog.

There's a number of interesting (and FREE!) games to check out and for those that didn't quite make the deadline there are still some promising titles that will continue to be developed in hopes of a late release.

Check out the latest news at the official 7DRL page.

MarioRL: But our princess is in another castle!

I'm working on MarioRL right now as my entry in the annual 7DRL contest.  7DRL is a programming competition that takes place annually.  The goal is to make a finished, playable Roguelike (aka dungeon crawler) game in 7 days.

There aren't any actual prizes or places.  If you finish your game in the allotted 7 days, you're a winner basically.

There are a lot of great roguelikes based on other games such as DoomRL, CastlevaniaRL, ZeldaRL and so on.  I realize a Mario themed anything isn't incredibly original but it hit me this weekend that no one has ever made a roguelike based on Super Mario Bros, a game ripe for rogueliking.  I mean, you travel through various dungeons, fighting monsters trying to rescue a princess.  A little cliche sure but perfect!

I'm using GM:HTML5 which I just purchased last week so I'm not sure how great of an idea that was but I'm rapidly learning the GML scripting language.  GM:HTML5 does have drag and drop game creation but for something like a roguelike game you definitely have to use the scripting language.

It's similar to Java or C++ in a way and while I'm no expert in either, I'm picking it up fairly quickly.

With any luck, I'll have a playable game by the contest's deadline and once that's over, I'll take my tune polishing and fine-tuning it.

And of course, here are some screenshots:

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