Grift & Grind: A 7 Day Roguelike

[TMC]

It's time once again... to make a roguelike in seven days for the venerable 7DRL Challenge.

Grift & Grind (working title):

A roguelike for the 2023 7DRL contest! Tile-based, turn-based, tactical with careful time and item management... but never mind that. It's a game about doing the bare minimum tasks to keep your job... or just trick someone else to do them, automate them, or score points with the CEO while you dodge your boss, mess with your coworkers, sell trade secrets and falsify expenses.

Previously I've crossposted my devlog entries between here and the game's itch.io site, but it's actually quite time consuming to fix up the formatting, so this time I'll just link there. I'll post some extra commentary here though.

Day 1

Day 1 is finished, actually it's 15 hours into Day 2, but I've only just finished writing my devlog! Argh! (Preview: Day 2 is very poor)

Day 1 - Unpaid afterhours (TMC)
Day 1 - Alarm clock goes Bzzzt (Seilburg)

[TMC]

We both skipped a day to save time. And I just spent way too long mucking around with screen recording and ffmpeg commandline args. Argh, got to put in less effort!

Day 2+3

Day 2+3: Take all the donuts
Day 2+3 - Progress at the Expense of Progress

[SwordPlay]

woo! exciting!

i can't believe i missed the start of it ;_; might still give it a shot tho.

good luck as always

[Bluefeather42]

I'm always impressed by 7DRL. At the rate I work at I might have a concept in seven days, if I'm lucky.

[TMC]

Well, realise that we're putting a lot of hours into this, not just afternoons. I'm quite unimpressed with the progress I'm making! Especially compared to the games other people manage in a week. Always a lot of nice games to check out, and lots of progress updates posted on itch.io, reddit, twitter, etc.
I would say that so far I have had no very productive days.

Day 4+5

Day 4 and 5 - Not tracking to requirements (TMC)

[Bluefeather42]

Well, realise that we're putting a lot of hours into this, not just afternoons. I'm quite unimpressed with the progress I'm making! Especially compared to the games other people manage in a week. Always a lot of nice games to check out, and lots of progress updates posted on itch.io, reddit, twitter, etc.
I would say that so far I have had no very productive days.

I like the art style. Is it going to be animated? (The only roguelike I've gotten into was Dwarf Fortress adventure mode)

[TMC]

No animations... except for the UI. Guess what, I did more work on UI today/yesterday!

Will combine day 6+7 devlogs again, and Seilburg is too burnt out on them and hasn't slept in 23+ hours. So here's a screenshot. Yet still the same dumb placeholder-but-actually-real tasks..

[TMC]

Well, we released what we had after 7 days, but it wasn't a successful 7DRL. And I'm still writing the day 6+7 devlog, argh. Until then I should actually post a link to the game here, shouldn't I?

https://seilburg.itch.io/grift-grind -- Plays in your web browser. Now with fixed walkabout graphics*


What I consider the most important and interesting part of the game, the player's nefarious metagoals such as getting your boss fired, are completely absent. The base-level game is also hugely unfinished, in fact you can't even get fired yourself (but your coworkers can!). This isn't a demo of the finished game, it's just something that looks like it, but without real gameplay. The fun in the game is meant to be finding efficient ways to score points so that you have time to do the more fun things, but that's certainly missing.


* (Initially it didn't export from Godot correctly: everyone was naked. But that's now solved. That's a funny story, actually: this is our 3rd time game where Seilburg built random NPC sprites out of pieces, and which broke when we tried to export. The sprite generators scan for all available images in a directory, which doesn't work as usual in exports. Despite the previous experiences it baffled us three times why it wasn't working, because this is the second time he made the EXACT SAME MISTAKE of reusing an old broken version of the code instead of the fixed version from the previous year's codebase. I told him last year to delete that bad code, but no!)