The 7DRL Challenge 2008 draws near!

The 7DRL Challenge 2008 Logo

The time is NOW, accept the 2008 7DRL Challenge!

The 2008 7DRL Challenge will run «March 8th» to «March 16th». We hope to see you there!

What is a 7DRL?

A Seven Day Roguelike is a roguelike created in seven days. This means the author stopped developing it 168 hours after starting.

The idea behind 7DRLs is forcing developers to finish a showable product instead of adding features endlessly to their grandiose, never to be released projects, a common pattern in the roguelike development world.

Incidentally, they are also useful as a way to test new ideas as non-traditional, experimental, scrapable roguelikes, thus allowing the genre to expand beyond its barriers.

You are welcome and encouraged to write a 7DRL anytime you want, as a great exercise to increase your odds as a sucessful roguelike developer; however, in 2005, the roguelike community established a yearly event, the 7DRL Challenge, in which all the world is challenged to create a roguelike in a one-week span.

The annual event occurs during a week in late February or early March. There is a chance that some other challenges may arise out of schedule, thus allowing more than one challenge per year.

7DRL Challenges are NOT about being a /fast/ coder, but rather proving you can release a finished, playable roguelike to the world. There is no winner of the challenge, but rather all those who finish are honoured for their work, the criterion is completeness.

There are some light rules for this event

  • Post on rec.games.roguelike.development when you are about to start development (You will have exactly 168 hours left after this) (Use google groups for easy usenet access)
  • You CAN use external libraries, game engines, pre-existing generic code/algorithms, pre-existing generic art, etc. You can even start your game from an existing game, if you are willing to turn it out into something unique, you must however say what resources were reused.
  • It is allowed and recommended to have a rough design idea of your project before starting
  • 168 or less hours after your initial post, post your results on rec.games.roguelike.development; if you were sucessful, post your announcement on rec.games.roguelike.announce

To the date, there have been four 7DRL challenges

  • March 5th to March 13th 2005.
  • February 25th to March 5th 2006.
  • October 15th to October 23th 2006
  • March 10th to March 18th 2007

Check This Roguebasin Article for further info, also, keep an eye on Roguetemple’s 7DRL Shrine

8 thoughts on “The 7DRL Challenge 2008 draws near!

  1. I’m hoping to participate myself, but we’ll see if I make the leap. I can code pretty decently, but I haven’t even begun to try writing or utilizing any kind of GUI system. I’ll have to spend February playing around with, and learning, curses so that I will be able to actually do the roguelike coding in the 7 day limit.

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  2. Although Game Maker is not the usual choice for making roguelikes, it works just fine. I use ASCII with different colors in sprites.

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  3. A shame… I have lots of things to attend to… hopefully in March I will have a little spare time… I am precompiling lots of things into my head to speed up any possible development

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