7DRL 2026
I've just finished up my 7DRL Challenge entry for 2026: The LLM-pire Strikes Back
I had quite a bit of time this year due to being on a break from work and I feel that this year is one of my more compelling entries.
Nevertheless, I was still scrambling until the last minute to bring everything together and the game isn't as polished or balanced as I hoped.
My entry's mechanics are inspired by the board game RoboRally by Richard Garfield (of Magic: The Gathering fame). I adapted the core "programming" idea for a single player roguelike experience and added some flavor of my own.
I chose a lightweight "LLMs take over the world" narrative; a topic on which many bytes have been spilled recently. Even though the theme might suggest it, I'm not staunchly anti-LLM as a coding tool. However, I do think there are some scary implications given our current social structures (a topic for another post, perhaps).
For my game engine, I cobbled together an unholy abomination of various TypeScript-based engines in my workshop. It's not the most elegant work, but it saved me some effort and got the job done.
Let's dig in with a quick post-mortem of what went well, and what went badly.
The Good Parts
- The programming mechanics are inherently fun and provide a challenge just to move around the map.
- The various board elements (rotating gears, conveyor belts) make the core mechanic a lot more interesting.
- Level generation was fun and easy since I didn't need to create crazy labyrinth mazes.
- I kept the scope down and cut some features I really wanted, but didn't have the time to complete.
- Top down perspective made it a lot easier to create decent looking art (as a mediocre pixel artist).
The Bad Parts
- Balance. As usual I feel like the game could use another entire day (or more!) of play testing and tweaking resource numbers.
- Not quite enough content variety. I would have loved more time to just crank out more and varied level chunks.
- The end "boss" isn't very interesting (no spoilers here though!).
- No real "build variety". There are only a small number of different upgrades and they don't radically change how you approach the game.
- I found a late-breaking JavaScript error that I may have fixed, but I'm not 100% sure. If your game freezes, I'm terribly ashamed.
All in all, I'm pretty happy with how this year turned out. I had lots of ideas that didn't make the cut, and I had to stop myself from continuing to work on it when the jam ended.
This year marks my seventh consecutive 7DRL entry; albeit with one entry being a little too rough to call a "success".
A recap of my previous entries:
- 2026: The LLM-pire Strikes Back (Success)
- 2025: Odin's Favor (Success)
- 2024: The Razing of Plum Parish (Success)
- 2023: Jotun Grav (Incomplete)
- 2022: Sewermancer (Success)
- 2021: H@CK3R (Success)
- 2020: Catacombs (Success)
Planning to continue my streak in 2027!