Balance Still Isn't Boring - What's Not To Roguelike?

Way back in the beginning of this blog, I made a post titled Balance Isn't Boring.  The idea that balance can actually mean things like tension, risk, reward, challenge, and ultimately gameplay has returned to the front of my mind in recent months, as I've gotten hooked on a couple of roguelike titles - Desktop Dungeons and Sword of the Stars: The Pit.  (While I have played and enjoyed FTL: Faster Than Light, Dungeons of Dredmor, and Don't Starve, I'm going to just leave them in the "different strokes/folks" bucket after their brief mention here.)

In a roguelike game, resources are ultimately finite and non-renewable.  The player explores some randomly-generated dungeon labyrinth which spawns both enemies and resources.  Death is a one-way ticket back to the title screen.  Small mistakes accumulate, and large mistakes can end a run instantly.  Luck can play a big role in individual runs, but flawless play will result in an impressive win rate.  Classic games most strictly following the formula are Rogue itself and Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup.

Casinos and Casuals

The main idea of roguelikes is that games are supposed to pose a challenge.  There are two genres I can think of that shun this principle.

The first is the electronic casino game, in which the player is not allowed to make meaningful decisions.  Because real money is being exchanged, losing is the point.  I mostly avoid casinos if I can help it, because they are weirdly absorbing in a way that isn't actually fun, and they burn money as quickly and surely as an open flame.

In some sense the opposite of the play-to-lose game, the casual farming game - or lose-to-win game - is the mindless trip to the casino played backward with virtual money.  The Learn To Fly series more or less captures the feel of it.  Every time you play, you lose, gaining money you can use to buy stuff for your dude, repeating as needed until you win.  Lose-to-win games usually include some degree of interactivity that is actually skill-based to some extent, reducing the number of times the player must lose to win if they're playing well.  (If gains are kept in check by diminishing returns or hard caps, then the same mechanics might not lead to a lose-to-win game.  Rogue Legacy has farm-and-die mechanics, but it's impossible to make any progress off of bad runs.)

Either play-to-lose, or lose-to-win - the final outcome is predestined.  These games are possessed with an inertia which plays out inevitably.  They are the tree which falls in the forest so long as someone is there to hear it - these games are the opposite of balance.

Desktop Dungeons - Hard Casual

Not all casual games are lose-to-win.  In some sense, any game which can be played on a workday to a satisfying conclusion without staying up late can can reasonably be called "casual."  This includes Chess, for example, as well as Tetris and Minesweeper.

Desktop Dungeons starts out looking like a dungeon crawling role-playing adventure.  You start by choosing a race and a class for a hero, and then you fight your way through a somewhat small dungeon - possibly stopping to worship a local deity along the way.  The game does not explicitly seem like a puzzle until you play more and learn to appreciate the huge role played by all kinds of "gimmicks" such as level-up heals and "piety storing" to front-load some forgiveness from your draconian deity - which you will need if you anticipate the need to do something Dracul won't approve of, such as drink a health potion or slay a zombie.

As the finish line is never far away, you can always incrementally build your plan as you go along.  "Converting" items from your inventory destroys them and triggers race-specific bonuses.  In more long-term games, the tendency to play the packrat because "you never know" can lead to huge end-game surpluses of consumables.  Not so in Desktop Dungeons, where even your most useful permanent items will be considered for conversion going into the boss fight.  It's a bit of a rush the first time you cannibalize your entire inventory incrementally at just the right times and barely finish the boss with nothing to spare.

This game offers a ton of replayability in the form of race-class-religion combinations.  For the harder levels, you may find that one size does NOT fit all, and that hammering away at your favorite setup won't work all the time.  (The downside is that preparing for a run adequately requires spending accumulated gold from the town's coffer, and it often takes experimentation to learn what will and won't work with a given level's minions and bosses.  A dry run with no preparation is typically in order if you are trying to save gold.)

The game has grown and improved a lot since the free-to-play alpha, both in graphics and in game balance and presentation, but the overall game flow is similar enough that the alpha serves as an informative sample of the finished product without spoiling the whole thing.  It's the ideal "demo" from both a player's and a studio's perspective.

Sword of the Stars: The Pit

Unlike Desktop Dungeons, Sword of the Stars: The Pit is a straight-up science fiction dungeon crawl, with the emphasis on crawl - while the original Pit was originally stocked with 30 floors, the first expansion increased this to a total of 40.  Considering that it often takes half an hour or more to complete a floor carefully, the audience is absolutely assumed to be deeply invested in the outcome of a run.  So The Pit takes the opposite approach - instead of Desktop Dungeon's quick runs with a tight puzzle feel designed to draw in a broad audience, The Pit aims to be a cult classic.  (I strongly suggest starting with Gold Edition.  It is the second of three DLCs, but it is also sold in the bundle consisting of The Pit + Mindgames + Gold.  Mindgames is where the core gameplay reaches maturity with the introduction of psionic powers, but it's just as easy to get Gold from the beginning.  The third DLC, The Pilgrim, is a nice expansion if you own and like Gold, in which case you will naturally want more.)

Easily a week or more's gaming time can be devoted to a single run, and each minute is full of tough assessments of risk, reward, and resources.  Food, ammo, health, armor, durability, and psionic energy reserves are constantly in a state of flux as the player continuously spends one or two in hopes of either conserving the others or finding more of it.  Am I so hungry that I'll waste a few rounds of ammo to get this over quickly?  Or is my health high enough that I want to get in melee range?  Can I just run away, or will I probably just get surrounded later?

Aside from depth of gameplay, there is an odd and paradoxical depth to The Pit as a work of fiction.   The overall plot of The Pit is hokey to the point where Kerberos Productions goes so far to break the third wall.  In a random dungeon run, you may decode a random message from The Scout's sister which reads (paraphrasing), "Hey Toshiko, remember the game we used to play with the secret laboratory and the mad scientists and the monsters?  I think the monsters are real this time..."  Incidentally, the overall plot is that you're diving into 40 floors of corrupted science unleashed because a cure to the Xombie virus is at the bottom, no more and no less.

The depth emerges incrementally with each run and with each new playable character you spend time with, whether it's The Engineer who jubilantly declares that "it can't be worse than calculus!" or the brooding and intense Liir, perhaps best described for outsiders as a "psionic space dolphin".  You'll also meet a fraternal Marine, a psionic soldier who was apparently trained on a strict regimen of watching 90s films on VHS, and the avaricious Morrigi - a sort of six-limbed red-and-teal dragon-bird.

Just getting to know your enemies is a bit of a journey.  For example, you will enter mortal combat against members of the Zuul race at various life stages.  In the early floors, you will find a quiet and seemingly deserted ruins of a research facility where you'll run across a few bats, some rats, and some hairy grub-like fanged Zuul infants, but as you go further, you will find giant rat-like Zuul pups before you eventually encounter the adult female, looking like an apish clawed wolf, and the adult Zuul male, a sort of psionic mastermind and all-around bad guy.

The reason that The Pit bursts with so much fertile imagination is that it is a spin-off of the expand-and-conquer-in-space RTS game Sword of the Stars, belonging to Arinn Dembo's expanding sci fi universe set in the 2400s, including one complete novel to date.  If you ever wondered what games would be like if real writer(-anthropologist)s wrote for them, then this is one of the best places you could look.

The Pit is a challenging mad plummet into the depths of a deranged Sword of the Stars buffet of death.  Have one of everything, but they're not responsible if it doesn't agree with you.  It's a pretty good mix for a hardcore game meant to be played repeatedly - don't bog the player down with too much plot, but do present a rich world and quirky characters with well-controlled voice acting that somehow manages not to be annoying months later.

I do have some quibbles with the game, especially with the inadequacy of the tutorial to unveil the arcane game mechanics one must master to go far in the game.  I also feel like the level-up heal breaks the fourth wall in a way that works for Desktop Dungeons but not for The Pit, and some minor control/interface issues get in the way.  But there's nothing that can't be overcome by Let's Play videos, the wiki, the forums, and old-fashioned dying from different things until you learn how to play better.  I'd like to make suggestions for improvement at length in a separate post sometime, but for I'd just like to recommend The Pit as a modern cult classic hardcore rogue-like that is very slow-paced and takes a weekend or two to warm up to.

(As I mentioned in earlier posts, I started a fan comic about the characters and plot of The Pit, but with a multiplayer twist speculating on how they'd interact with each other.

Also, I finally beat the game on Normal.  I was playing as The Scout and I had really good early luck.)

Joining Forces - Parody Fan Comic In Progress

Hey everyone,

I'm still around, and I'm still sort of broke.  My latest project is the Joining Forces fan comic, which is roughly a fan parody of Sword of the Stars: The Pit (with added-on multiplayer for the sake of comedy).
You can start at the beginning and keep clicking "newer post" (unless I rework the layout someday).  For now, there are three episodes - a prologue, a title page, and a typical comic complete with a punchline.

Suggestive themes are present and will only get worse.  Not planning anything explicit, and it's all consensual (except some of the characters may be left unable to un-see, -hear, and -think things from time to time).

Rogue Legacy - the difference between challenging and frustrating

A new game is out called Rogue Legacy, by Cellar Door Games. It has been described as a "Metroidvania Rogue lite" game.



The setup is the usual 2D platform action RPG set in a haunted castle, but there is a novel twist: you have no hope of surmounting the odds in one go, but whatever loot you find is passed on to the next generation to try again, who will in turn charge onward fighting for whatever gains they can manage before passing the torch to the next generation of valiant-but-doomed explorers, hoping against hope to break the cursed chain of death in some remote future. The midi-style music sets the mood fairly well, paying homage to Super Nintendo-era classics and setting a tone that is at once lighthearted and gloom-and-doom in a way that is easily appreciated from an armchair.

The trailer video and the summary at gog.com linked above capture the heart of what this game is in an amazingly succinct and accurate way. I can only say that it is what it looks like, and what it looks like is a week's supply or more of crack for action gamers. I suggest trying it out, but be warned that after digging in, you may be tempted to purchase a PC gaming controller like I am.

In addition to the truth in advertising, this game is solidly balanced, and the evolution is pleasant to watch as your hapless sirs and ladies clumsily carve out hard-won foothold after foothold, crawling and then swelling in power, only to splat against the challenge around the next bend like so many flies on the great windshield. This game is ridiculously charming, scoring points with its fourth wall humor even where its small development team blatantly cuts corners, such as indicating female gender with a pink bow atop the knight's helmet a la Ms. Pac Man. Other references, such as to Paper Mario, are scattered about as well.

There are minor flaws in my opinion, and most likely they could be fixed with relatively minor patches. However, I won't go into details, as these detractors are so much more minor than many other areas of the game which have been painstakingly refined with love and respect for the player.

Rogue Legacy is an ideal case study for a rant I'd like to go on about a somewhat subtle - but very important - distinction where Rogue Legacy succeeds, and where any game with a heart of gold must succeed: the distinction between challenging the gamer and frustrating the gamer.

What does a challenging game like Rogue Legacy do? It makes the gamer say, "this game is hard", "Aaaaah! Nooo! I messed that up!", or "oh wow, that's going to make things difficult", or "huh, I'll really need to prepare more for this!" A frustrating game makes you say, "god, what the fuck am I even supposed to do if that happens?!?" or "come the fuck on! Why do you hate me?" or "ok, what's the exploit?" and eventually, either "I quit" or at best "I beat the level, but that was really stupid."

They are a lot more distinct than one may think. As an example, the hopeful heroes of Rogue Legacy are spawned with various random deformities, ranging from the mildly useful to the cosmetic, to the mixed blessings, and finally to the mild-to-moderately hindering - I give no examples, because they're fun to discover for yourself. The main point is that restraint is used on the part of Cellar Door Games so that each deformity introduces challenge rather than frustration and an instant loss.

As a veteran gamer, I have a learned reaction too loot drops called ephemeral loot paranoia. That is, if a pile of coins falls to the ground, I fully expect it evaporate in 5-10 seconds. as far back as the 80s, developers have been doing this to us, and if one were to ask why, the only real answer is, "because fuck you, that's why!" In a nutshell, that is the refrain of the frustrating game. It can come in a thousand forms or more, but Rogue Legacy is amazingly diligent about just saying no every time.

To give a positive example, observe the collision detection. Rogue Legacy is consistently just a tiny bit biased in favor of the player. The fireball that skims through a few pixels of your helmet passes by without harm, while your sword strikes seem to hit targets just a tiny bit farther out than you might expect. These little things add up: the base difficulty is high enough that the developers are secure enough in their game design so that they can tweak the hitboxes just an epsilon in your favor. That tiny epsilon is all that it takes for the player to pull off some daredevil moves - moves which other developers would have rewarded with death, because fuck you, that's why.

Rogue Legacy has such confidence in its respect for the player that it goes the extra mile, trolling the player from time to time secure in the knowledge that the player will take it in jest. No, you cannot reach that Fairy Chest, but maybe your daughter with Dwarfism will have better luck!