Todays Update makes "Weldon" a lot more of a game rather than a mechanic exploration! 

Change List:

• Enemies that die in combat actually stay dead
• You can no longer kill enemies from the walking around scene, pressing A still buys you space but you can't kill the enemies this way, at least for now... maybe a spell is in order... that scope tho
• Changed the combat pointer out for a smaller one, mostly due to the restraints of GB Studio not measuring in pixels but 8x8 tiles and seems to round down (hence hits = scratches sometimes)
• There is an end scene if you make it through the last room
• Music changed out, I wasn't happy with the original backing loop, I'm still grappling with OpenMPT but what I've got going on now is way more indicative of what i want, and there's a combat theme now

Notes:

• Combat is super simple still, though i've set up constraints that allow lots of variation of the rules that are there, this is mostly due to a roadblock I hit having to do with the way the game boy random number generator works
• Combat is the same for all enemies, i'm working on it
• No room obstacles yet, i would expect i'll get at least 1 done for the end of the 7DRL

Thoughts:

I guess I haven't done this on these devlogs yet but I've got a little time to kill. 

First off, Thanks to the organizers of the 7DRL, having the fun pressure of the game jam has really got me focused and given me a mental break from the coding I do to pay the bills. It's my first jam in general, and i'm eager to do more, though paying homage to Rogue is something I'm particularly interested in having grown up playing Moria and Aangband. I chose the game boy because it's my favorite platform, and since I'm a Unity dev by trade its been really good to have my options pared down and to have to work within those limits. 

GB Studio is fantastic, the dev team has created a very approachable way to build and distribute software for the Game Boy and Game Boy Color. The GB Studio Discord is a friendly place full of helpful people, if you're starting out on your GB Studio journey, don't wait on joining the discord and asking around. 

The challenges of working on the game boy come from the fact that you are essentially working (through lots of abstraction) with simple assembly based system. It's been a really interesting process to get inside the heads of the people who made the games I played growing up.

I'll do a full postmortem on Game Boy dev once I've made my submission, otherwise I'll likely repeat myself.

Both "Weldon" and my other title on itch "Aspect Chimera", are based on a bunch of dreams I've had over the course of time. Chimera is going to eventually encompass a larger area, and you can get an idea of where I'll take Weldon in terms of locales, especially if i get to a second area type this week since the art is already laid out. My intention in the grander scheme is to create a representation of these dreams as an open-world interactive fiction, not so much a combat roguelike. But for now I have to build up the development muscle in bite sized chunks...

Happy Hunting

B