Hi everyone,
We started sharing the game design documents of Dungeon of the Endless and are happy to read your comments in these threads. If you aren't much into the Rogue-Like Dungeon Defence genre, you'll be happy to read more about Endless Legend, our 4X Fantasy game, very soon so no worries.
Today, on this blog post, we will talk about the Rogue-Like elements of Dungeon of the Endless [DotE]. Arthur aka Mysterarts, the game designer on DotE.
He recently graduated and was offered a position at Amplitude; you can read more about him here. But for now, he replied to three questions we asked him about: the Rogue-Like elements of DotE.
THE ROGUE-LIKE IN DUNGEON OF THE ENDLESS
What Rogue-Like elements does Dungeon of the Endless have?
Well first of all, Dungeon of the Endless is hard. You are going to fail a lot before even finding your way out of the dungeon. Your heroes will die very quickly and very often, and bad decisions will lead you to a sooner “Game Over”. In that case, in a traditional way, you will not be able to load a save and will have to start a game from the very beginning. You will also have to deal with the random factor that will bring a lot of diversity to the game, but I will discuss that a bit more in the third question. With that said, every game really feels like a new adventure.
The game difficulty in a Rogue-Like isn’t necessarily insurmountable. It will apply to a certain logic that will need the world to be controlled by a “simulation” that is somewhat balanced and fair to avoid players’ frustration. The game will ask you to make choices (for instance: how will you choose to spend that resource? What strategy are you going to adopt?) and allow you to take more or less risks. In this Dungeon, this risk/reward relationship is represented by the event of door opening. You can either choose to do nothing, but if you want to progress, you have to put yourselves (and the Crystal) in a dangerous position.
Every time you play, you will learn from your mistakes and this is how you will be able to go further away in the dungeon. Eventually, if you managed to reach the surface and escape the dungeon, you will feel even more rewarded.
Why do we die that often in Dungeon of the Endless?
Unlike people’s assumptions, dying repeatedly will end up being a positive and useful action.
It’s at the core of the concept: when playing a rogue-like, you accept that you hero is going to die and that you are going to lose everything. You can already prepare for that! This is what makes the genre less likely to be accepted by a wider audience. However, this feeling of fragility, where you know that everything could collapse at any moment, makes a rogue-like fascinating. Paradoxically, your mind is more likely to get attached to something you will lose very easily.
There are two types of permanent death in Dungeon of the Endless: the heroes’ death and the game’s. Each of them is to be approached as an opportunity to learn and improve your game experience. Moreover, each game will allow you to unlock persistent elements that you will be able to reuse in your next games, or compare with your friends’. But don’t worry, this is not going to make the game any easier, it will simply change the game experience 3
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We are hoping you won’t feel frustrated to start all over again thanks to the diversity offered by the procedural generation.
[PANCZASU] What are the aspects procedurally generated in Dungeon of the Endless?
You will find a part of random at several levels of the game. At this stage of the development, we don’t know exactly what will depend of it, but here are a few examples:
- the initial crew, heroes met in the lab will be picked randomly in a pool
- each level of the dungeon is randomly generated when the player enters
- every time a door is open, an event will randomly trigger. If it is for instance a wave of monsters, its content will be generated depending on the game progress, the environment, etc.
- items sold by merchants and found in chests will be generated upon discovery
- technologies at your disposal during the course of a game will be selected from a list and will lead you to set up different strategies each time
Please note that we have made the choice to not push the procedural generation to its maximum. For instance, the playable heroes will be pre-defined (but there’ll be plenty of them!), just like monsters. What we seem to be losing in terms of diversity, we will earn it in the form of knowledge and attachment: little by little, the player is going to get used and learn how to master these heroes, they will know the monsters’ behaviours and how to get rid of them. This will also allow us to provide a more efficient work on the visuals, background stories, personalities and the uniqueness of each hero.
Consequently, the combination between all these elements is almost endless (^^), just like the replayability! Our goal isn’t simply to vary in an aesthetic way all of the players’ possibilities, but also to surprise them, and make them try new strategies, and always explore the game in a different way.
NEXT WEEK
Next week, we will discuss: the art of Endless Legend. Ask your questions in the comments below!
