One year ago today, I published the first build of Grid of Yendor to itch as a jam submission. It lacked many features that you can take for granted now. The UI was much more basic, there was only one difficulty, and only the enemy names were randomly generated. The only way to move was with the arrow keys, which meant you had to shuffle your right hand back and forth from the home row every cell.

Oh, and it was nearly unbeatable, even by me. (caused by lack of testing - hey, at least I won’t make that mistake again) Having committed the worst sin in jam games by making it too hard, I had to reduce the difficulty of some bosses to make the game reasonable.

The jam version was a cardboard cutout of a roguelike pretending to be a fully-featured game. Like so many other jam games, it was gameplay boiled down to its bare minimum. Despite the basic presentation, it seemed like the concept struck gold. GY quickly became my most popular game, and when the jam ended, it ranked 32nd in fun and mechanics in the jam I was participating in, out of ~1000 submissions.

Then I made a mistake. I decided to keep working on the jam codebase, thinking I could refactor it into a manageable form. I then procrastinated and started working on new features and better presentation instead. While the game now looked good on the surface, it was a mess underneath. My hiatus wasn’t directly related to code quality, but it was obvious when I came back that rewriting from the ground up was going to be faster and less head-bangingly frustrating than trying to refactor bit-by-bit.

I (re-)started last week. Adding new mechanics was surprisingly fast because I had old code I could copy from. Not being under time pressure, and the year of programming experience both in C# and other languages really helped me structure my code and made sure it was clean.

The most noticeable difference is the font, which I changed from Roboto to Tomorrow. It’s a big change, since, you know, you’re staring at a grid of text for the entire game, but I think Tomorrow fits the angular look of the UI better, and is still very readable (very important for a fast-paced game).

Most basic mechanics are already implemented. There probably won’t be any new features for the first release, but an improved new player experience and win/death sequences are priorities for the following ones.

I need to update the art as well with the new font, and some features are still not done, but I think I can release the update early next week. You can follow me to be notified when it happens!

To everyone who has rated, commented, or recommended this game to others, thank you so much. I couldn’t have kept my motivation without encouragement from others both online and offline.