7DRL Idea: Lurk Under Wires

The 7-Day RogueLike Challenge begins tomorrow. And I’m planning to make a game that looks exactly like a roguelike, quacks like a roguelike, fits the Berlin Interpretation definition of a roguelike, but doesn’t actually play anything like a roguelike.

You play as an enigmatic hacker, or possibly a rogue AI – I’ve not decided yet. You create Objects, which look exactly like traditional roguelike ASCII maps, and send them forth throughout the world to seek out and destroy your enemies.

For a change, I’ve got the full gameplay mapped out before I’ve even started coding. I’ll be interested to see how the stealth mechanics work out in practice, though – I’ll be hiding a lot of information from the player, even information about the player’s own units, which could either work well or be really uninteresting. We’ll find out.

The annoying thing is, I’ve got to wait until tomorrow before starting work on the code. Ah well.