Today I focused on upgrades. There are certain enemies which grant attack, defense, and tech items when damaged. Upon completion of a level, this dialog appears letting you choose an ability (abilities let you manipulate the sequences of items).

Tomorrow I need to play the game a ton and tweak mechanics until it is fun. I have an idea for a final boss fight: A slime which divides when hit, into slimes with random combinations of properties!

Lots of work on mechanics today. All the attack and defense abilities are implemented, and most enemies do something interesting when attacked. Also, it’s possible (but not advisable!) to walk on the green sludge found around the sewer. Most enemies are also vulnerable to the sludge, which can be used to the player’s advantage.

Today I connected the user-interface to gameplay. Each time the player deals or receives damage, or uses a tech, the respective list decreases and the relevant action is applied (though not all are implemented yet). The most complicated part of this is the aim UI (the red line in the screenshot), but this was largely adapting some existing code to work with a grid of 2x2 tiles.

Tomorrow I’ll implement all the combat outcomes, and give each type of enemy a distinct effect which applies upon damage/death.

Lots of visual changes today! I implemented a brand-new renderer. The most interesting thing about it is every game cell is rendered as a 2x2 block of text cells. The obvious benefit of doing this is the health of each enemy can be displayed on the enemy tiles, along with a letter indicating what type of enemy they are, and an arrow indicating where they will move on their next turn.

Another neat side-effect of 2x2 rendering is the stairs can actually look like stairs (rendered using block characters)! I had to improvise a symbol for the player character. I made an arrangement of box-drawing characters that kinda looks like a futuristic ‘@’ if you squint!