Urban Warfare

Year 20XX. In the way back home after blowing some serious stuff on enemy territory, you, the bravest pilot of the confederated air forces, are shot down by anti-aerial fire. You barely survive the crash, but you find yourself in a not so good situation. In the middle of an enemy city, and with all the enemy forces looking for you. Fortunately, your plane had a device which made it implode uppon crashing, and then dissapear without flames or anything that could break the start of your stealthy journey out of the city!Armed with a rifle, a knife, and 10 HP, your mission is to escape this city so your friends can pick you up without risking themselves too much.

And so, this is Timofei Shatrov’s entry for the 2007’s 7DRL challenge. As usual for him, this is a LISP project, after his last year “Zombies!”.

City generation is very cool an unique, I love the buildings and how the streets are numbered, also, I like even more the fact that it is not grid based, an unique touch.

The game has a functionality of Zoom levels, which look very cool, although there are some game play related issues with these; given that you can play on any zoom level in some of these you will see enemies while some others wont. Perhaps a fixed number of zooms levels would make it easier for both the developer and the players!

Would be nice if there was a key to switch to normal zoom (1) and map-level zoom (+12 works to me), fiddling around with + and – can be dangeorous, also, displaying what’s the current zoom level would be good.

Autocentering would also be nice, although I dont know how plausible it is performance-wise

I find an issue with ‘turtle’ movement, as you dont know exactly how many steps you will take everytime you move forward or backward, due perhaps to current zoom scale and heading? it is a bit confusing, and thats why I resorted to the numpad + q and e to look around. (or control+direction). I think it must work internally like normal movement, but having heading in mind for forward, etc.

Finally, the game goal is pretty simple, and I understand this because of its 7DRL nature; it would be nice if you had to collect something in order to escape from the city (say, your plane crashed somewhere because you ejected just a bit before, and you must recover secret intelligence information before leaving the city, so you must get yourself better weapons to strike the heavily patrolled crash area, recover the stuff and escape the city, but off course, you need to steal an electronics store first, grab a radio and call your friends to pick you up. Something like that!

Thank you for the game, and I hope it shapes up nicely on time!

Gameplay

Theme is nice, looking at the city map and planning the best escape route is funny.

Performance issues make the game a bit less enjoyable. There are some issues with the movement code, which prevent you from knowing the result of walking in turtle mode. Some additional info would also be nice (Zoom Level for instance)

Aesthetics & Theme

The game looks a bit unpolished on its aesthetics side, there is also a need of more elements to influence the theme and increase immersion.

Features

Zoom Levels, non-grid city generation, also uses non-circular FOV.

Content

The game is pretty much empty, seems the author concentrated on the random generation and zoom levels for this release instead of content. Only one kind of enemy, no inventory and just a weapon.