Getting ready for the 7DRL

The Seven Day Roguelike Challenge is upon us!

Against my better judgement, I've signed up to create a roguelike game over the next seven days despite the fact that I won't be taking time off of work like I'd originally planned for this.  But when has that ever stopped a passionate game developer, right?

The plan is to make a game called Ardennes, a game set during WWII's Battle of the Bulge.  You will take the role of a squad leader, and try to lead your squad through a mission across a procedurally-generated hex landscape with a minimum of wounds and casualties.

For the last several weeks, I've been doing a few things to prepare for the challenge:

• First, I've been reading up on how the Canvas element in HTML5 works.  I've been tinkering with learning how to draw images, windows, text, etc., into an HTML5 Canvas element, and it has gone fairly well.  I think I have a grasp on it.
• I made a Javascript-based scenegraph displayer framework for use during the challenge.  I call it "Spartan", and it supports adding a bunch of "view" objects with "draw" routines to a common view space, and it will render the items and handle things like figuring out what view is being rolled over.  I'm sure there are plenty of existing JavaScript libraries for this stuff, but part of why I'm doing this is to teach myself how it works, so I'm using my own library.  (I hope this is not a mistake - I won't have time during the challenge to deal with technical issues with the library.)  The library also contains some things like button support, image views, scrollable areas, etc.
• I've also been looking through some of the graphics that I'd made for the "No Soldier Left Behind" tabletop game I'd designed a while back, seeing what I may or may not be able to salvage.
• Finally, I've been percolating on how the game itself is going to work.  Originally, I was envisioning a squad movement roguelike, but the more I thought about it, the more I thought trying to move a squad of soldiers around in a tile-based fashion would be tedious, so I decided to move "one level up" to a more FTL-like approach, where the map is larger scale, and we move from large abstract area to large abstract area.

I'll try to post something here each night about my progress.  Hopefully, by the end of the week, there will be something to show!