7DRL - Day 6, Level Design Really Matters!

Today was a wild ride. I started out staring down trying to retool a huge amount of content to make the game fun and I got a little intimidated. Instead I ended up redoing my entire graphics library. This was, in part, triggered by my inability to render black text on a white background. There were a bunch of other issues but that were less severe but this one pushed me over the edge.

I finally decided to check out REXPaint and redid my library to render the on screen characters using the included PNG CP437 fonts instead of trying to use SDL2_ttf to build my own sprite sheets at run time. This ended up working way better.

After doing that I decided to implement contour bombing for level generation. I couldn't be more happy with the results! I wanted the game to feel like dashing through a dangerous cave and these new levels really help to bring out that feeling. I kept putting off redoing the level gen because I thought other things were more important but it turns out they really weren't. This had a much bigger impact than I could have imagined!

I've got one more day left, I'll be working on shoring up the gameplay mechanics and doing some final balancing. I'm finally feeling good about this game :)

Bonus gif of level sample generated levels