Game Portraits

Game Portraits is a Bonus Room in Rogue Legacy.

## Contents

The portraits room is a Bonus Room that contains a random portrait of a game in Cellar Door Game's library (the publishers of Rogue Legacy). The data presented in the portraits tells the developer name, the development term, the date of release, and descriptive text.

## Possible Portraits

### Don't \*\*\* Your Pants

 **Description** | This was the first game we ever made, and back then we used to be called Decade Studios. In it you must stop a man from pooping himself using only text input. It was originally designed on a bus, and we decided to make it on the weekend. It did pretty well. The game has a swear word in it, and we were thinking about changing the title to be more friendly. But then our balls grew back and we stuck to our guns.
A big part of the game revolved around making a text adventure that allowed people to input whatever they wanted. To solve this we had to pre-empt what we thought people would type. We did this in 2 ways. First, we reduced the amount of options a player had (A man and a door), and secondly, we built an achievement system which was used to give the player direction. The game revolved around the achievement system so heavily that it was placed into the game over screen progression. That was a small but very vital change.

### Band of Bears

 **Description** | This was our second game we ever attempted, and it was for the 2009 DreamBuildPlay contest. We found out about it pretty late, so we had to play catch up with everyone else. Fresh off the success of DSYP we decided to go big... stupidly big. And thus, Cellar Door Games was formed. On top of starting a project well beyond our resources and expertise, we also juggled full-time jobs to get this game running. It was pretty sucky.
The game featured the B.E.A.R.S system (Bare Effort Adaptable Room System), which would change rooms depending on the number of players playing. The BEARS system didn't just tweak numbers, it tweaked puzzles as well. We ended up in the Top 20 which was good but not high enough to win anything. Eventually reality (and common sense) came back to us and we realized we had to scrap the project, or in the very least put it on indefinite hiatus. The demo boss was pretty frickin cool.

### Tribal Tallies

 **Description** | Tribal Tallies was the first project we had worked on months after the horrible experience with Band of Bears. It was a bit of a test project, to dabble our feet in water of iOS gaming since we had never tried making something on mobile platforms before. The game was simple in concept, as you tapped numbers in sequence as fast as you could.
To spice things up we implemented several modes, like tap backwards, hidden numbers, and tap matching. @text: We thought the scope was reasonable, but the game ended up taking much more time to make than expected. It didn't help it was all coded on a hackintosh. It was a pretty plain game. We could have done better, but we were all playing it safe after Band of Bears.

### Q

 **Description** | Our fourth project. After Tribal Tallies we took a few months off from making games and just focused on our full-time jobs. We got angsty again, so we decided to make a puzzle game. At this point most of the original founders of Cellar Door Games left to pursue other opportunities, and the unwanted remnants are what compose the company today. The game used a queuing combo mechanism to force players to think about how the tiles would fall in order to build massive combos. We made it free but nobody picked it up either. After the failures of Band of Bears, Tribal Tallies, and Q, we prepped ourselves to pack it in and close the company.

### My First Quantum Translocator

 **Description** | My First Quantum Translocator came about when our company was at its lowest point. After 3 failed games we had already mentally checked out, and decided to make this tiny flash game for kicks. Absolutely no expectations were made during development, and it was more of something we did for fun than anything else. Needless to say, response to the game was huge and it is the sole reason that Cellar Door Games exists today.
The moment we released MFQT we knew there was no going back. Interestingly enough, most people believe the game was inspired by Portal, but their similarities were completely coincidental. The game actually spawned from a character we had dreamt up for the game, League of Legends. In truth the commonalities between Portal and MFQT only started to come up once we added final art and story to the game. Either way, we were pretty proud of the game. It played well and it had a nice ending.

### I Have 1 Day

 **Description** | If you ever asked us, of all the game we made which one would be our favourite, there would be a unanimous agreement with I Have 1 Day. As children we were raised on the adventure game classics like Kings Quest and Monkey Island, so this was really our homage to some of the best experiences we ever had in gaming. The game revolves around a meta-time puzzle where the player had to only 24 hours to beat the game. Every puzzle had multiple solutions with time repercussions, which forced players to think of the best way to go about solving things. One interesting fact. The second ending was added at virtually the last minute, and without it the entire game would have sucked.

### Villainous

 **Description** | Villainous was one of the more risky endeavours we undertook. The initial concept was a reverse tower defense, which sounded like it could be a good idea, but we had a hard time converting the 'could' to 'would'. Most people who have played the game thinks the process was an obvious one, but lots of stress and arguments were involved in this project. The entire idea was scrapped 3 or 4 times before we settled on its final version. It is ironic then, that to-date Villainous is far and away one of our most successful titles. It was also the most painful.

### Bullet Audyssey

 **Description** | Bullet Audyssey was our very last game prior to working on Rogue Legacy. Being a bullet hell that was based on rhythm and beat charts, Bullet Audyssey was the most technically challenging game we had ever worked on (yes, even moreso than Rogue Legacy). Just to create a stage required 3 editors running in unison. Development for this game was also a little non-traditional, as a lot of pre-planning was required to make sure everything clicked. Being heavy advocates against documentation, this didn't settle well with us, so we had to talk out the whole game, for like, half a day.
The game had the player absorbing enemy bullets in order to fire them back and absorption happened on a beat which matched the song being played. Initial playtests were disastrous, as the game was too hard and people became incredibly frustrated in the very first minute. By playtests, we mean 1 dude who doesn't even like Bullet Hells. But that's larger then our usual test pool. The game didn't perform very well when it released. That gave us the confidence to make Rogue Legacy!