What is a 7DRL?

A Seven Day Roguelike is a roguelike created in seven days. This means the author stopped developing it 168 hours after starting.

The idea behind 7DRLs is forcing developers to finish a showable product instead of adding features endlessly to their grandiose, never to be released projects, a common pattern in the roguelike development world.

Incidentally, they are also useful as a way to test new ideas as non-traditional, experimental, scrapable roguelikes, thus allowing the genre to expand beyond its barriers.

You are welcome and encouraged to write a 7DRL anytime you want, as a great exercise to increase your odds as a sucessful roguelike developer; however, in 2005, the roguelike community established a yearly event, the 7DRL Challenge, in which all the world is challenged to create a roguelike in a one-week span.

The annual event occurs during a week in late February or early March. There is a chance that some other challenges may arise out of schedule, thus allowing more than one challenge per year.

7DRL Challenges are NOT about being a /fast/ coder, but rather proving you can release a finished, playable roguelike to the world. There is no winner of the challenge, but rather all those who finish are honoured for their work, the criterion is completeness.

Event rules

• You CAN use external libraries, game engines, pre-existing generic code/algorithms, pre-existing generic art, etc. You can even start your game from an existing game, if you are willing to turn it out into something unique, you must however say what resources were reused.
• It is allowed and recommended to have a rough design idea of your project before starting

How to participate into the challenge?

• After the initial date chosen for the challenge, post your starting development notice on rec.games.roguelike.development
• 168 or less hours after this initial post, post your results on rec.games.roguelike.development; if you were sucessful, post your announcement on rec.games.roguelike.announce
• The challenge is always Saturday to Sunday; if you start after Sunday you will have less than 168 hours as in-challenge 7DRLs must be completed by the closing time. You can still use 168 hours and have a normal, out of challenge, 7DRL, however

To the date, there have been five 7DRL challenges

• March 5th to March 13th 2005.
• February 25th to March 5th 2006.
• October 15th to October 23th 2006
• March 10th to March 18th 2007
• March 8th to March 16th 2008