Postmortem

I set out to make a game with a simple, but deep, mechanic.  I think I mostly succeeded in this goal.

The core mechanic is firing arrows and therefore positioning and terrain have an implicit role. I stripped away any unnecessary game play elements. And to increase depth a secondary skill was added "Elven Speed", this secondary mechanic complements the primary and allows the play to move at three times the speed as other enemies and perform several actions, to either gain a better position or to take on multiple enemies. 

What went well

• Pico8 was a pleasure to use, it's simple but powerful. The constraints helped to limit the scope of the project which is perfect for 7DRL.
• I'm not an artist so I was particularly happy with the sprites and the overall look of the game

Mixed

• Arrows are part  of the speed system, I wanted to be able to it arrows out of the air, but I didn't had time to create a ranged enemy. Consequently because arrows don't immediately hit a target, it is possible for them to dodge, so leading a target become necessary
• The spider queen was created on the last evening and so it's a little half baked, I wanted a unique mechanic for the end boss but all I manged in the time was to increase health and add slightly smarter AI than the other enemies. The spider queen will avoid line of sight with the player and will hunt them with A-star. I would have liked to give this boss a ranged web attack.

What didn't go so well

• Map generation, using perlin noise made a nice looking map but I found that it often produced less than ideal maps, it was too random and because I also based the placement of items and enemies on the ground type, it meant that some games were much easier or harder than others. I also had to carve out a path to the next section of the map to ensure connectivity, it followed walk-able ground for the most part but some levels ended up being all forest and so the carved path was all the player could walk along. Not very interesting.

Overall most of what I set out to do was achieved and I'm happy with some of the feedback I've received.  Designing a game is much harder than the sum of the programming and art.