7 Day Roguelike 2023: UI, Night, Loss, Menus

I added stats like health, fuel, and daylight and display them in the game’s UI. There’s a hinting system that displays hints based on what tiles are currently on the screen.

If the day meter gets to 0 it becomes night time. A ghost spawns every 20 turns. Ghost are invincible and unlike the player, they can move diagonally. This is so that if the player is driving the boat away from a ghost and they move diagonally the ghost can keep up with them. Night is imbalanced on purpose. If you get caught on the river at night you’re almost certainly going to lose the game, but if players almost make it to the inn in time I want them to have a small chance of surviving the few turns of desperately trying to outrun the ghosts and get inside.

It’s currently possible to lose the game by running out of fuel and getting killed by ghosts. I plan on adding a very simple combat system tomorrow to add some tension to exploring islands and gathering junk to trade for fuel, so that will be a third way you can lose the game.

Finally I added a menu system. Currently I’m just using it to show flavour text when you interact with the locals in the starting town, but this will be the basis of interacting with potential passengers and also the shop where you buy fuel and upgrades.

To create the graphics I used a tool I’ve been working on called text-paint. It lets you paint with text. I hacked it to allow exporting bincode-encoded grids of character data which I can deserialize in the game as backgrounds for the menu. If I get time I’ll make backgrounds for the main menu and also for the text that gets displayed when you win and lose the game.