7 Day Roguelike 2026: Day 1

February 28, 2026

This year my game will be about taking a road trip through a mysterious exclusion zone, kind of like Pacific Drive, only it’s one continuous journey rather than a series of short runs. And obviously it’s an ASCII turn-based traditional roguelike.

I spent today dusting off my codebase from my submission from 2 years ago (Electric Organ), reworking the UI, and adding a driving mode pictured above. The gameplay loop will alternate between two modes: a driving mode where you choose where and when to stop and hopefully make some decisions about which routes to take and deal with random events (though these are all stretch goals) and a regular walking around mode, scavenging for resources to keep the journey going.

I don’t have as much free time to devote to 7DRL this year. I’m going to try to get a basic framework up and running tomorrow for procgen, implement the systems that drive the status bars at the bottom of the screen, and add a win condition. Then the remaining work will mostly be adding content, which I can add as much or as little of as I have time to do so.