Insider - Ideas on roguelikes and progression (Patreon)

Hello! So, I'm thinking about the next episode of GMTK. And something I'd like to touch on is the idea of roguelikes and persistent upgrades. 

Here's the outline.

What is a roguelike?

A roguelike is a game with procedurally generated levels and permanent character death. Some people have more strict definitions, but the modern use of the word (to describe games like Spelunky, Binding of Isaac, etc) just has these two tenets. 

However...

Some games sneak around the concept of permadeath, by letting players make permanent upgrades that will be applied to all future characters. An example is Rogue Legacy, where money found during a run can be spent on persistent upgrades to health, attack power, etc.

This is very different to a more "traditional" roguelike, such as Spelunky or Isaac, where the player's abilities are the same every time they play the game. Your health pool in Spelunky is four, no matter whether this is your first or 785th attempt.

What's the outcome?

To see the outcome of these two types, we should plot the difficulty curves on a graph.

In Spelunky, the difficulty (red) is flat. Sure, the temple is harder than the mines - but we're talking about your overall experience with the game, over the course of many runs. The blue line is your personal skill level, which is always improving. When the blue line goes above the red, that means you now have enough skill to finish the game.

In Rogue Legacy, the game starts out at its hardest, but the difficulty is always reducing as you are improving your character's health, damage output, etc. But your skill is also improving.

Right now, it looks like players will finish the game at the same time. But if we change the angle of the blue skill line, to represent players getting better at the game at different speeds, we can see a change.

In Spelunky, a highly skilled and fast-learning player can finish the game very quickly.

But the same player will take much longer in Rogue Legacy, because they need to wait for the difficulty level of the game to reduce. It's not just down to their own skill, but also the ever decreasing level of the game.

And what about a player who never gets much better?

They'll probably never finish Spelunky...

But it's practically a foregone conclusion that they'll finish Rogue Legacy, given enough time.

Rogue Legacy's oddball difficulty curve means that your success with the game is largely directed by the abilities - not your skill. Making it a case of "when" you'll beat the game, not "if".

Why is Rogue Legacy like this?

From reading people's reactions to these two types of roguelikes, it seems that some gamers dislike that failed runs in Spelunky are "wasted", and prefer to make meaningful, tangible progress with each go at a roguelike.

As such, games like Rogue Legacy - which offer persistent upgrades - are popular with some gamers. While those that like a more traditional roguelike experience (myself included) prefer more strictly static games like Spelunky.

A middle ground

But perhaps there's a middle ground. As a number of roguelikes do let you unlock stuff as you play, to give that sense of progression - they just don't noticeably change the difficulty of the game.

Some examples include

Extra stuff in the random generation. Enter the Gungeon has currency that can be spent to increase the number of guns that will be randomly dropped in future runs. These aren't more powerful than the basic set - just different.

Different ways to play - Into the Breach has different unit types that can be unlocked. They're not stronger than the default set, just - again - different.

Cosmetic upgrades - Spelunky lets you unlock character skins that do absolutely nothing. But it's fun to collect them all.

Shortcuts to bypass early areas - Dead Cells and Spelunky offer these as unlocks, as a way to quickly get into the "meat" of the game. Spelunky, at least, has ways of encouraging players to stop using the shortcuts.

Story content - Hades, from Supergiant, lets you find objects in the game world which can be taken - upon death - into the hub world and given to characters to unlock more story content.

Advancements in the next run only - Into the Breach lets you take one character from a failed run, and use them in the next. They don't stack or stick around permanently, so it will only affect the next run you play - giving that juicy "just one more go!" feeling.

That being said

Some players just really like improving their character. That's at the heart of RPGs and clicker / idle games. While I personally find these grindy, many gamers enjoy that. So adding persistent upgrades is, ultimately, more about preference than a hard-and-fast rule.

Still, there are ways to do this in a more interesting way. Dead Cells forces you to get to a shop to bank your cells - you'll lose them if you die. This forces you to be skillful enough to get to an actual shop. 

There's also a fun way to play Rogue Legacy, which is to see just how few levels you need to go through to beat the game. That could be an actual mode.

And how about a game where it gets harder as you level up? That could be interesting to explore.

Still, I think it's clear that a sense of progression is important to many players. But it doesn't have to be things that mess with the actual balance / difficulty of the game. Whether its shortcuts, more surprises in the randomiser, additional ways to play, or story content...

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What do you think? Interesting? Clear? Am I grossly misrepresenting things? Are there other examples I could go for? What type of roguelike do you like best?

I will need to do something in this episode to avoid snotty people who think these aren't roguelikes. I'll deal with that, don't worry!

Cheers

Mark