A Step Towards 7drl 2023

This is likely the last update for Jacinto, originally an entry to the 2021 7DRL event.

I started work on a custom JS engine to build RL games back in 2019, inspired by Bob Nystrum's book "Game Programming Patterns". In 2020 I submitted to the 7DRL event for the first time using this codebase. That was Flume. That first entry was mostly focused on adding functionality to the engine. This entry, Jacinto, was meant to see how quickly I could put a game together using the functionality written in 2020, with the goal being: "spend more time on gameplay and feel, rather than new abilities and types of game objects".

I was super happy with the end product, but could feel it just doesn't have the juice I appreciate in so many other people's projects.

So after a looong hiatus from this code, I cam back a month ago to see if I could churn through the backlog that was meant to be completed during the 7DRL week. These are just some of the updates made over the last month:

• Revamped AI system
• New abilities for some of the Player classes (lay traps, call reinforcements, buff allies)
• Rebalanced player, enemy, and item stats
• Improved procedural map generation systems 
• Simplified user interface
• Added juice (screen shake, basic overlay animations)

All of these changes amount to quite subtle gameplay shifts. But I'm still happy with the result and the feeling of laying something down completed in some sense. I skipped the 2022 7DRL event being both overwhelmed by life and underwhelmed by my last attempt in 2021. But what I'm most excited for is how this last month of work will pay off in making of future RLs.

Thanks again to the three Judges that played back in 2021. I based a lot of this last month's backlog on your feedback and fixing some of the bugs y'all found.

See you in 2023!