7DRL 2015 Challenge - Day 3

It is now the end of the third day of the challenge for me, since I started later than most of the participants. Happily, others are also on their day 3, so I don't feel that behind everyone.

The plan for yesterday was combat, enemies, and entering/exiting the dungeon. That didn't quite work out. Instead, I spent most of the time getting multiple areas to generate, moving between them not breaking the game, and having a nice village show up. The village is still way too random looking for my taste, but I can fix that later if there's time. At least it works. The end of day 2 thus brought no combat but it did bring a semi-interesting world to explore.

Day 3 started with the prospect of adding the farming. Since this is supposed to be a game with some farming elements, I thought I should probably add that. I ran into UI difficulties almost immediately, much more so than I expected, and that consumed most of my time today. Fortunately, those problems are fixed. The player can now explore the world, look at things, open and close doors, and switch in and out of farming mode.

In Harvest Moon and games like it, you typically have a variety of tools that you switch between and then use them on the tile in front of you. Since I didn't want to add facing to an ASCII game, that meant two possibilities: 1) have a use+direction for each farming action, or 2) have an auto-use for some item wherever you move. I am going with option 2. Option 1 is (barely) easier to code but it would be exceptionally tedious to play. (Who wants to use three discreet button presses for each farming plot they want to water?) Hence, the player will switch into and out of farming mode. This mode will equip a selected tool, allow auto-using wherever they walk (or bump into as may be the case), switch tools, and toggle the auto-using. There might be a better way of doing this, but that's how I'm going to develop it.

So, in the meantime, here are a couple screenshots of me wandering around and opening doors.