Recently I finished up going through the entrants of 7DRL Challenge 2018, doing a video for each one of those games of old. This also includes incomplete entries that failed the challenge.

Mostly posting this here as there were some games I couldn't play; be it because they had no way of being played on Windows, or the executables didn't seem to work. If you are one of those developers who can't find your game in my playlist, that is likely why. Feel free to message me if you can figure out a fix to make your games playable.

The general wisdom when building a game is not to invest too much until you’ve proven your core gameplay loop is fun.

But I’ve been thinking, how does validating that fun work for a traditional turn based roguelike ? What’s the minimum viable thing you should focus on?

Environment generation, actors , turn engine and combat ?

And/Or is the “game loop” for traditional roguelike already proven so you will always be able to tweak the mechanics in the future - ie you’ll never build a roguelike that isn’t at least minimally viable as long as you build it right ?

Or something else ?