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Sword's End 2023 Outlook

Cursed Sword Roguelike 2023 #

originally posted on Reddit in the r/roguelikedev subreddit

Sword's End (Previously "Unnamed Cursed Sword Roguelike")

Sword's End has a proper name now, and I've been slowly building it up for just over a year now. it is a hobby project, and I allow myself to get distracted prematurely optimizing or exploring other projects quite a bit. That said, 2022 was great! I got into more formal project management on Github, better planning and note taking in Obsidian MD, and lots of development work & experiments.

2022 Retrospective

Looking at my git commits, I did the majority of systems work in 2022: FoV, Pathfinding, Aspect system, Logger, Peek View, Combat, Undos. I'm pretty proud of making all of this work, work together nicely, and hopefully be easy enough to transfer to another project as needed (7DRL soon :)).

I keep trying to figure out how I want the art to work, and did some tests: prerendered 3D from blender, as well as downscaled 2D illustration tests. Overall, I love experimenting with the art pipeline to find something bearable (want lots of code work & design iteration without tons of art & effort). Ultimately, neither result ended up filling me with joy, and both of them are meaningfully more work than my current low-fidelity pixel work. I bought an asset pack for abilities (maybe just for dev, maybe permanently, not sure) and have been messing around with palette cycling & indexed sprites for recoloring. All signs point to keeping with the current aesthetic in the game view for a while.

One outcome of the art experiments is that the game allows entity sprites to be any size (they'll get scaled appropriately on load). This is a meaningful step towards loading all my assets from other sources and allowing visual mods, though that light is still at the end of a very long tunnel.

2023 Outlook

This year I'm hoping to get a very simple vertical slice up and running for my close friends in the first half, and fully flesh out my planned meta after wards. the map generating needs a big overhaul: I want to refactor a lot of it, but the system I want to implement relies on Godot's graphedit functionality, which appears to be in flux in 4.0. on that note, will be porting the game to 4.0 whenever its out of beta, so that will slow me down a bit (but I'm hoping to benefit from the GDScript 2.0 changes in a big way). I may also rewrite some of my more taxing code in C#: none of it is a deal breaker yet, but there's some obvious optimizations to be had.

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