7DRL contest 2007.

The Seven Day Quest

One of the successful contestants on this year’s 7DRL contest is Glenn R. Wichman / capmango, who recently released his webbased roguelike The Seven Day Quest. The roguelike is written entirely in HTML and JavaScript, no Flash or PHP-stuff added.

The author’s participation in the contest is the first of three contests he wants to take part in (according to his blog, there’s still a 24 hour comic to draw and a one-month novel to write), and the name of his roguelike surely is a ironic reference to these goals.

What To Do

The object of the game is easy: Within one week, you have to explore seven areas (called realms), e.g. a forest, a castle or a desert, each consisting of several levels. Hidden somewhere in the areas there are seven lost amulets and you have to – of course – find them and bring them back to Wentora, your home town. There, the tourist season will begin soon and the amulets are one the main targets for visitors.

After the game has begun, you can decide by yourself which area to visit first; when you start, a timer begins to run and with every turn it increases. When this clock has reached 24:00, the game will be over, but if you succeed in carrying one of the amulets to Wentora, it will be resetted to zero.

User Interface

Controlling the game differs not very much from other roguelikes. Move your @ with cursor keys, pick up items with p-key and use portals and steps with < and >, (or, alternatively, by pressing Enter).

While the realms are displayed using graphics, for the character, the monsters and all items capmango uses ASCII-chars. ! is a potion, ? a scroll etc. However, the ASCII-chars are in fact transparent PNGs, so the fonts on the player’s computer are not used. There are several variants of the ASCII-PNGs, adjusted to the current realm-style. This is good on the one hand (as it makes everything more consistent), but bad on the other (because sometimes it’s hard to read). Anyway, I’m sure the latter is easy to improve.

The inventory is represented by simple choice boxes. Every box contains one item, plus options to use the item. As only relevant options are shown, the handling feels very user-friendly. This is important, because you will soon stumble upon lots of items.

Beneath the dungeon view and the player status, there’s the message area, followed by several buttons which are used to start a new game, to view the help file or to adjust the game’s balancing. With this option it is possible to change the difficutly of the game in detail – from the strength of the enemies to the amount of items generated.

Adjusting some of the mentioned factors is really necessary, because – sorry to say this – the default balancing of the current version sucks. Getting killed by a kobold on level 1 after one hit was an unexpected event.

Final Thoughts

The realms only differ in the tile-style that is used to show them. The rather slow random dungeon generator does not create realm-specific layouts, there is no character generation, saved games disappear after closing the browser window¹ and the HTML is no XHTML. Although all these points can be mentioned, there’s no reason to criticize them. The Seven Day Quest is a roguelike written in only seven days and especially the speed issue is clearly a problem of the platform. The game is, as far as I know, the first roguelike using only JavaScript and HTML, and it does it well.

Overall, the game is really fun, due to its simplicity. You don’t have to memorize dozens of keys, you don’t need to think of complicated concepts, just try to survive and find the amulets. Here’s the link, again: babelsphere.com/7dayquest/game .

Mario Donick

 

¹ Correction on 2007-03-19: Saved games don’t disappear. Instead, they are stored in cookies that expire after one year.