How to make a roguelike
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[0] also talked about here https://www.gridbugs.org/wave-function-collapse/ and other places
This is a guy who’s put over ten thousand hours into his seminal game, and to the genre overall. I feel like Josh — along with Tarn and Zach Adams (Dwarf Fortress) — have by sheer force of will translated roguelikes into the current era. (And yes, FTL and Spelunky are awesome as well — just farther afield.)
Respect.
Hades, FTL, Vampire Survivors, Gunfire Reborn, and Crypt of the Necrodancer all satisfy these.
RimWorld is not at all a roguelike because a "run" can easily last hundreds of hours.
FTL and Slay the Spire are probably my top two favs in the genre.
They may be roguelikes with additional elements, but there's no one true definition of what a roguelike must be.
And yes, I'm aware of roguelites. The existence of a more specific piece of jargon does not invalidate the use of the more generic term.
Insisting on a narrow, historical use of language serves only the purpose of gatekeeping and pedantic "I know better than you" behaviors.
The quintessential roguelikes are Nethack, Moria, Angband and AdoM. You're a @ fighting monsters represented by other ascii characters, in an environment (usually a dungeon, though AdoM expanded that) represented by ascii characters. Procedurally generated, turn-based, super deadly, very tactical, with an almost infinite amount of stuff you can find, use, or do. Playing all the way through the end is nearly impossible, would take many hours on a single run, but years to learn and master the game to the point that you can actually make it that far in a single run.
I can understand adding some graphics to the game (though I'm personally not a fan of that), and AdoM certainly showed how the genre can be stretched from a single dungeon to a landscape with multiple very different dungeons, but the further you move away from this core, the less roguelike the game becomes. Because it simply becomes less like the original game rogue (which nobody seems to have played).
I suppose 'roguelite' is a more suitable name for games that take some of the roguelike elements but not all of them, and make it into something completely different.
Language evolves. Rogue, Nethack, Angband, etc are now just a type of roguelike.
The only people who use "roguelike" so loosely are people who never knew what it meant in the first place.
You seem to be under the (imo mistaken) impression that language is prescriptive. The idea that we define a term and then people will either use it "correctly" or gave stigma for being wrong.
Imo, language is descriptive - people use a word a certain way and the definition evolves to meet that usage.
Just like how "literally" means "figuratively" in some contexts. You might feel that's wrong, but fundamentally the language is being used that way.
Define roguelike. You tell me what you think it means, and we will see if that definition is applied with consistency.
> Just like how "literally" means "figuratively" in some contexts. You might feel that's wrong, but fundamentally the language is being used that way.
Congratulations, you have discovered sarcasm. The meaning of literally is not different because people employ sarcasm. It means that they are being sarcastic. You literally can't be sarcastic if a word like "literally" doesn't have an agreed upon meaning.
And words can change meaning to whatever is understandable. Definitions follow usage, not the other way around. Merriam Webster didn't write "yeet" down and then a bunch of teens started using it.
1) Run based (re)play, typically starting from a weak state and moving into a strong state. Then restarting at that weak state many times.
2) Randomization of the run in upgrades, powers, environment, or choices. Thinking on your feet and dealing with the random. Typically, environmental randomization is necessary.
3) Permanent death within a run. No save scumming - if you die in a run you'll have to start another run
4) Some sort of meta progression, whether that's a home base the player returns to, or just the increased knowledge of game systems (like in Nethack)
5) A community consensus that the game is a roguelike.
6) Emergent gameplay from multiple overlapping systems, often interacting in unexpected ways
7) Exploration or selecting paths through an environment where progress in the game usually requires leaving familiar areas and entering unfamiliar ones
So rogue and Nethack meet all of those, absolutely. But so does Hades and Spelunky and binding of Isaac and Hades and FTL. Some games have roguelike elements, but are probably not roguelikes, say Inscryption.
"Community consensus that it is a roguelike" is not a real definition, anyway. Did you think yourself particularly clever for coming up with that one?
Anyway, thank you for proving my point. Your inability to adequately "roguelike" demonstrates that, as I have been saying, it doesn't actually mean anything the way people use it.
Roguelike just happened to be one of the genre labels with a long-standing and passionate community. Now the community members are everywhere speaking out against this dilution. This is not gatekeeping — anyone is welcome to play roguelikes — it’s preservation of the genre’s distinctiveness.
This is literally gatekeeping. You are deciding which things may pass the gate.
mostly shallow content sold as something shiny in a repetitive way, lack of original story/background, time vampire if no proper checkpoint/save system in place.
The best egregious example of terrible game design is the game called Returnal where the game designers sentenced the player to recollect most of the items/loot upon failure because who knows why. This isn't a problem in itself if done properly, but why going through the same area again and again, why collect the proper weapon again if you fail at a boss, is just plain stupidity or malignancy.
So in essence a childish idiot sentences you to replay his "super creation" multiple times, because he thought that's cool. thank you.
you, the gamer, will come into this equation with your most precious resource: time. how do you want to spend your time? by repeating the same BORING shit or progressing and experiencing new, stimulating areas while a story is told to you?
Shoutout to ADOM, a game I spent countless hours playing.
So many games are called "roguelike" from so many different genres that the word has lost all meaning.
Near as I can tell, the only thing actually meant by it is "when you lose you start over". By that definition, checkers is a roguelike.
Roguelikes almost always involve building up a character or deck or cards or whatever by acquiring more stuff that changes the gameplay, and it's the loss of this unique thing that you've built that is relevant to "when you lose you start over."
Additionally, roguelikes are almost always heavily randomzied, when you start over you get brand new decisions to make.
"When you lose you start over" certainly is a roguelike characteristic, but what losing means and what starting over means is strongly similar among roguelikes and not similar to losing or starting over in checkers.
The term is self-descriptive. It means "a game like Rogue".
Lately, the term has been latched on to by people who don't know what it means. They latched on to it probably because they thought it sounded cool, or saw a game on Steam with the "roguelike" tag that was fun. Let's examine just how many genres the term encompasses:
Isle of Arrows (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1946970/Isle_of_Arrows/) is a tower defense game. It's tagged as a roguelike.
PlateUp! (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1599600/PlateUp/) is a game about managing a restaurant. It's tagged as a roguelike.
Nimbatus (https://store.steampowered.com/app/383840/Nimbatus__The_Spac...) is a game about building space drones. You can compete against other players or play in sandbox mode. It, SOMEHOW, is tagged as a roguelike.
Brotato (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1942280/Brotato/) is an arena bullet-hell game where the only randomness is what items and upgrades you're offered. It is tagged as a roguelike.
Vampire Survivors (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1794680/Vampire_Survivors...) is another arena bullet-hell game and there is almost no impactful randomness. You have a very high degree of control over what your build looks like. It's tagged as a roguelike.
Slay the Spire (https://store.steampowered.com/app/646570/Slay_the_Spire/) is a deckbuilding game. It's tagged as a roguelike.
Dome Keeper (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1637320/Dome_Keeper/) is a base building game. It's tagged as a roguelike.
The Van Game (https://store.steampowered.com/app/2081860/The_Van_Game/) is a game about traveling to national parks. It's self-described as being inspired by the Oregon Trail. Was the Oregon Trail a roguelike? The Van Game is sure tagged as one.
Another Farm Roguelike (https://store.steampowered.com/app/2116850/Another_Farm_Rogu...) is a farming sim. It even has "roguelike" in the name.
Risk of Rain 2 (https://store.steampowered.com/app/632360/Risk_of_Rain_2/) is a third person shooter without procedural generation. The randomness is in the equipment you find. It is tagged as an action roguelike.
Darkest Dungeon (https://store.steampowered.com/app/262060/Darkest_Dungeon/) is a game with a long progression arc. There is randomness but no main character. In fact, your characters can die and you don't game over. Your entire PARTY can die and THAT isn't game over (https://steamcommunity.com/app/262060/discussions/0/61282346...). It, too, is tagged as a roguelike.
Caves of Qud (https://store.steampowered.com/app/333640/Caves_of_Qud/) is a roguelike. Like, an actual one. It's tagged as roguelike AND it's also tagged as "traditional roguelike". Which is yet another indicator that the term simply doesn't mean anything of significance anymore.
Why does nobody describe action RPGs played in hardcore mode (e.g. Diablo and Path of Exile) as roguelikes? They fit both of your criteria.
How come roguelike is not associated with games like Fortnite or PUBG? Again, both games provide a good deal of randomness and character building.
We have games from nearly a dozen genres that are described as being "like Rogue". Some games have a lot of randomness, some don't. Some games described as roguelike _don't even feature permadeath_. And some very popular games with impactful randomness and character building ARE NOT described as roguelikes.
The term means literally nothing.
It's not just "permadeath", there's also the seeding and randomness of each game . (No-one would argue that Super Mario is a rogue-like).
Additionally, and while this is stretched to some degree in games like Hades, there's the discrete-time based nature of the games compared to a game like Isaac for instance.
Then with rogue-lites there's also a layering of meta-progression on top of the game loop progression.
Saying that roguelikes are "just" permadeath is misrepresenting the genre entirely.
And the nature of words is that you might conclude that rogue isn't necessarily the quintessential rogue-like game, but that's okay.
- Random generation
- Resource management
- Exploration
- Single ruleset for players and enemies
- Combat focused
- Multiple viable strategies
- Meta-progression where (most of) the unlocked ships are strictly worse than the starter ship
To elaborate on this, most games tend to have unlocks or game modes that are overpowered, giving you a "victory lap" on subsequent playthroughs. Roguelikes tend to give you interesting unlocks that can still be powerful, but tend to be a lot harder to play than the original. (This is not a hard and fast rule, more of a rough idea.)
That said, I think most players will find it interesting that the weapon they started out with is generally considered to be strongest in the game. One can argue details about Flak I or beams, but the humble Burst Laser II is right up there.
Regarding Engi, they are not particularly difficult. For me, the most problematic were Rock ships which are based on using rockets, and, of course, stealth cruiser without shields.
- Abstract/symbolic representation over realistic/literal graphics
- Systems (without documentation) as a primary aspect of play
- Procedural content generation
- Permadeath
Permadeath is the least novel of the concepts, but it is key to the effectiveness of the others. Permadeath adds drama and stakes to the player's experiments with the game's systems, and adds importance to the results of the procedural content.
This hits me hard as I am always 2 days before releasing my first roguelike game on Steam since 2021 (shameless plug: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2053250/Hellway/).
> Release early and often
Uhh, I really don't think it's a good advice for gamedev.
I really miss the times when games were polished since v1.0. Random crash on boss fight? Hey, it's an early access / beta / v0.0.1 / we were in rush, forced by some non-sense deadline set by our kickstarter campaign (or ego). Wait for the updates!
> Uhh, I really don't think it's a good advice for gamedev.
It is, but it leaves out a crucial bit of information, namely who is the audience to whom the game is released. It's important to get feedback early, especially gameplay feedback. At the same time, failed releases to the general public do little to inspire confidence or provide the valuable kind of feedback required in the early phases of development.
Among others, I think Risk of Rain fell prey to this, but I may be thinking of a different game.
Classic roguelikes like Nethack are also incredibly hard to win.
When done well, it's about putting the concepts and mechanics in front of players, so that they can provide feedback. Maybe the magic system you have in mind is super confusing. Maybe you wrote a throw-away portion in a way that makes everyone think it's going to be central to the eventual plot.
With a small group of friends, you get a lot of bias - you'll build the game your friends enjoy. The easiest way to find out how a commercial audience reacts is to expose it to a large number of players.
Obviously there are BAD early access games that ignore this advice, but I've also played well-established games with numerous patches that are still full of bugs too.
Like how most software is built these days.
The author is the creator of the popular commercial roguelike, Cogmind.
Even made some CSS graphs for it (slightly outdated): https://hypertele.fi/8b7ac4d1cbecbf8b
Fiverr
It looks better if you add someone else to the credits anyway
Nah, I'm good.
What I said in my head:
Having shipped a goodly number of video games, both as part of a team and as solo developer over a 20+ year career in professional game development, and a further 20 years as a hobbyist developer since leaving the game development industry, I strongly disagree with your statement. And based on the fact I am more than capable of composing my own music score, and really, I'd simply be pulling from my back catalogue AKA raiding either of my soundcloud accounts or my "abandoned ideas" directory, for several of the pieces, I don't think I should outsource one of my competencies.
They are game AI nirvana. No one has any excuses for bad AI in a roguelike.
http://www.roguebasin.com/index.php/Dijkstra_Maps_Visualized
"Roguelike" is one of those irritating, smugly obscure terms that keep surfacing in HN post titles. What doesn't help is the failure to capitalize "Rogue," which would at least provide a clue that this is a reference to a particular work.
Originally rogue likes were that, but specifically in the gameplay genre of turn-based dungeon crawling RPG's. These days they can be in other genres: twin stick shooters, card games, action platformers, etc.
While runs are typically short, it is not always the case. What makes permadeath more acceptable is that thanks to procedural generation, your next run will be different from your last one, avoiding the repetition that can make starting over such a bad experience.
It is such a great combo that permadeath and procedural generation are most often seen together, the roguelike/roguelite formula.
Permadeath is very engaging, try playing a game in "hardcore" mode if it is available and you will see what I mean, it plays with your emotions like nothing else. Problem is, once you are dead, starting over is a tedious experience, same levels, same story, no more surprises, etc... That's where procedural generation comes in, giving you new levels and maintaining the level of excitement on every run. The sense of progression comes from going further and further as you get better.
In the same way, procedural generation is great but for a single run, it will never be as good as a handcrafted environment, it really shines when you do multiple runs, and a great way of making people do multiple runs is, you guessed it, permadeath.
Contra for the NES would be an excellent example of this. The whole game lasts less than an hour for even a moderately-paced run, but it's quite difficult if you're not used to that specific type of game, so in practice it'll take much longer than that for most people to beat it, as they have to restart multiple times. Same deal for Super Mario Bros 1.
Roguelikes are the same kind of loop, but with the improvement that the levels are somewhat different each time. They're still usually similar enough in style/theme/enemies that skills carry over from run to run, but you at least can't just brute force memorize everything. You have to Git Gud or you'll be stuck forever.
What has become really popular and was introduced by roguelikes is using procedural generation in games. When it’s done well it does wonder for replayability.
Nah come on. They are incredibly popular since the indie revival age (~2005). Arguably one of the most popular indie genre. Spelunky, FTL, The Binding of Isaac, Rogue Legacy, Slay the Spire, Darkest Dungeon just to name a few. Hades, which is pretty much an AA rougelike.
Recently the biggest hit is Vampire Survivors [0]. Top 50 game on Steam with 20-35k players.
0, https://store.steampowered.com/app/1794680/Vampire_Survivors...
If you excuse the lack of procedural generation, it is not much different than other modern roguelike games like Hades or FTL.
Depends on where you draw the lines I suppose.
That's every shmup!
Also it’s just addictive, punches way above its weight.
I do so wish we had landed on a different genre name for games that share these meta characteristics.
Language evolves, and often the root etymology of a word becomes not quite accurate. One can stand on the shore and tell the tide it is wrong for coming in, but that's not going to stop it. You can tell people to not evolve their language, but it'll still evolve.
Even then, most video-game genres are even LESS descriptive than "Roguelike". If a game is a "shooter", "simulation", "action", or "roleplaying" game, it's quite hard to tell what those things really mean. It turns out that "Roguelike" has actually become one of the most descriptive terms when it comes to game mechanics in recent years.
"Goal/win condition" describes what GAMES are. Games have win conditions. That is what makes them games.
Darkest Dungeon is tagged on Steam as a "roguelike" (and generally discussed as such from what I have seen). It doesn't feature permadeath. Your entire party can wipe in a dungeon and you go back to town.
There is no win condition in Tetris, and arguably there's little to no input into Progress Quest.
> There is no win condition in Tetris
Uh... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_O3Oaz2bos. Also, I am not sure how you would have a tournament for a game with no win condition.
> arguably there's little to no input into Progress Quest.
I don't think most people would categorize Progress Quest as a game.
But there are whole genres of games that you can't win. Minecraft creative mode, the Sims, most MMOs, Cities Skylines, etc etc etc.
And Wikipedia considers progress quest a game, I consider it a game, and the author considers it a game. It might be fairly called a zero player game, but I think it's reasonable to apply the label game.
These are all games that you set your own goals and achieve them. When the player runs out of goals for themselves, they stop playing. Sounds like a win condition to me. Just set by a different person.
> And Wikipedia considers progress quest a game, I consider it a game, and the author considers it a game. It might be fairly called a zero player game, but I think it's reasonable to apply the label game.
I could find a whole bunch of people to say the earth is flat. So what?
I don't consider it a game. What makes the author any more right about that than me?
It's a bit like "story" or "song" or "movie" - there's a lot of stuff that could accept those labels, and some of it is going to be real avant garde.
It's fine for you to hold your opinion, it's just that the rest of us are going to move on with our lives.
They are all games with procedural generation or elements of randomness which have absolutely nothing to do with the gameplay loop of Rogue.
At some point people called them roguelites but I don’t think it makes much sense.
That said, elements of the game(s) are now found in a ton of popular games; a big one nowadays is Hades, which is a roguelite in that the levels are only semi-random, but it has a high replayability value, even when you make it to 'the end'.
There's other games out there that just use procedural / semi-random generation; Diablo and Diablo 2 were big 20 years ago, Bloodborne was big 5ish years ago and they're still making discoveries in the randomized dungeons (with some number manipulation though, has to be said), etc.
Great gameboy translation: https://github.com/binji/porklike.gb
It is bloody hard, but where else can you find corpses of your previous attempts, and with some of your gear [1]? Where else can you grow fingers? Where else rings on your fingers will cut off fingers if you morph into a giant? Where else you can switch bodies with other monsters?
[0]: https://www.old-games.com/download/4031/ragnarok-a-k-a-valha...
[1]: I have developed a whole strategy around it. Scribe player class is extremely difficult to survive in early game, but they possess a very rare item in their inventory: stylus, which allows rewriting scrolls, an extremely important thing. So die as a scribe many times, then start as a blacksmith, and pick up a stylus from your previous character's body..
In Nethack
The rest are just Zelda clones with permadeath.
For example this Asteroids inspried game.
https://www.polygon.com/2014/2/18/5423466/galak-z-the-dimens...
It isn't even that. The early access game "Brotato" is described as a roguelike. It does not have procedurally generated levels. Just a square arena.
What do you dislike?