Saturday, March 12, 2022

7DRL 2022: Complete


 

I'm excited to share my entry for this year's Seven-day Roguelike Challenge: Amulet Raider. It uses Rogue's setting (dungeon, amulet, potions, etc.) and XQuest's gameplay (fast mouse-controlled action). Here's a video of it in action:


The game is written entirely in JavaScript using WebGL shaders. It's by far the largest JavaScript program I've ever written. The code quality is not great; I was putting things in at a furious pace. JavaScript is not too bad for small things. I found myself increasingly relying on VSCode's syntax highlighting, which tries to show unused variables and function signatures. A lot of the bugs I had were the dumb variety (misspellings, calling functions with the wrong parameters). These are the things that type systems were created to catch. Perhaps next time I will try TypeScript. The edit/test cycle was really fast for this though. It made the shader programming in particular really fun.

2 comments:

Jonathan Sharman said...

This is really cool! Using a trackpad is definitely hard mode though - I'll have to come back to this with a real mouse. ��

Big +1 to trying out TypeScript. I've found it to be very low friction, and VS Code has great support for it.

James McNeill said...

Thanks! Yeah, it does require a good mouse to play. Once you have that, and have the sensitivity adjusted suitably (comma/period keys), it shouldn't be too difficult to get through.