A lot of the powers/abilities in hardpointe are my favorite recycled bits from previous 7-Day Roguelikes. My favorite by far was my 2015 entry: Heavy Axe.

In any event, after some only minor tweaking to the pathfinding code, I now have a 'Heavy Axe' ability in hardpointe that functions much the same: a unique item gets thrown across the map. Use the power again to "recall" the axe, which will travel back to you and smash into any enemies along the way.

I also put a few more gifs on this Sharing Saturday thread on /r/roguelikedev if you want to see more!

I recently ready a blog post called The Slow Application Development Methodology that got me thinking about what I enjoy about hobby roguelike development, but also some frustrating parts of dealing with my own limited productivity.

Here are some brief design development principles for my current project, in the hopes stating them publicly will help me stick to them. These principles come from experience over the course of many 7-Day Roguelike Challenges (both successes and failures) and most importantly, learning my own weaknesses.

1. Make a game YOU want to play
2. You are not building a roguelike engine
   (no, seriously..)
3. Don't reinvent the wheel (ROT.js is your friend)
4. Work on small chunks at a time - no grandiose leaps into refactoring hell
5. You really, really, really aren't building a roguelike engine
6. Aim for a solid 'coffee break' game worth of content.
7. When you have something that's not embarrassing to play, get some feedback from real users
8. Expand core gameplay only after #6 is done

Looking to have #7 done by the end of this month.. we'll see! In the meantime, here is some more gameplay. I have 4 working powers, and have completely rebuilt the menu system so that it is super-easy to drop in new interfaces. This is the kind of thing that is boring to code but will make future features so much easier to add.