How Modern Roguelikes Are Becoming Approachable
By: Josh Bycer
Tags: Game Development, Indie Game, Videogames, Games, Game Design

Tightening the gameplay

Progressive difficulty is not the same as directly adding content to a game. As a designer, you are effectively “layering” on the difficulty of the base experience. This creates a problem when it comes to balancing games built on multiple builds or options — the higher the difficulty grows; the amount of viable choices shrinks.

Fun or weird builds that could work in a pinch lose their viability. Any time the game increases the stats of the enemies or weakens the player, it’s going to dramatically affect what the player can do.

Here’s an example: let’s say we have an attack that does 10 points of damage. The base health of an enemy is 20, meaning that the player can kill an enemy with two uses of that attack. Now, let’s raise the progressive level and increase enemy health by 15, that same enemy will now take four hits to kill and is a lot harder to fight.

This is an issue I ran into with Monster Train. While I enjoyed the game for its variety of builds and options, the higher I went up its covenant system, the harder it was to make suboptimal builds work. For any game that gives the player random equipment or options, the RNG (random number generation) at play becomes stricter.

With both Slay the Spire and Monster Train, I’m at the point with their progressive difficulty that if I can’t create a suitable build within the first floor (or first couple of battles respectively), then I know my chances for victory are going to be next to zero.

For action-focused titles, higher progressive difficulty levels are like pushing yourself to the limit while lifting weights. Eventually, you’re going to hit the limit of your skill and won’t be able to make any more progress with the progressive difficulty. With Dead Cells, I found that as the game limited your ability to heal and recover, I could not get far into its mode due to my playstyle.

You may be thinking that the solution is to just rebalance options, but therein lies the problem with progressive difficulty. The very options that aren’t working at the higher difficulties are still very much viable at the base level. You could end up making things worse for players by presenting them with something powerful to pull the rug from out from under them later on.

Therefore it’s okay to introduce new systems or rules with your difficulty, but you need to be very mindful of changing stats. If the final level of your progressive difficulty is so difficult that there’s only a 10% chance of everything lining up for a win, then you may want to tone things down. And finally, we have an obvious point — always work from the bottom to the top when looking at balancing your levels. You don’t want to be balancing #15 and then come to the realization that it’s #8 that is causing the difficulty spikes.

Opening the doors

Progressive difficulties, along with persistent systems, are some of the more popular ways of opening up roguelikes to a larger audience. Not everyone will be able (or want) to play your game at the highest setting, but it allows your design to be more accommodating to a larger audience.

For more thoughts on roguelike design and its implementation, be sure to check out my next book Game Design Deep Dive: Roguelikes coming at the end of this year, acknowledgments are available over on my Patreon.

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