In consideration of the longer form gameplay loop of my game being hour to hour, I’m thinking about what do other roguelikes do to improve these factors.
What do roguelikes implement to increase their fun-factor?
Im thinking of Risk of Rain 1 & 2, Binding of Isaac, Dead Cells.
This region of rogue-likes I think typically have more long-form goals where you’re aiming for unlocking things that require a full playthrough ranging from 20 minutes to over an hour, this usually takes form of unlocking characters + alternate abilities and items that have significant stat changes and provide new effects.
Dead Cells
Dead cells has a lot of ‘juice’ to the game, the animations are super fluid and it is super satisfying to play – the actions in the game are fun on their own and it’s combined with rogue-like elements itself.
The game is also heavily focused on mastery as well, timing dodges to avoid enemy attacks and learning their attacks to minimise damage to yourself, heavy on Bushnell’s law.
Risk of rain 2
Risk of Rain 2 comes to mind with padding out gameplay a lot, items are highly sought after for becoming stronger so the player is heavily incentivised to look all around the map for equipment – combine this with the fact that in a single run there is 5 levels to complete until either going to the final level to escape or loop back to level, it’s very easy to go up to an hour in a single game.
The levels are also gigantic so it can take roughly 8-15 minutes to scavenge an entire map, you are SO SMALL!
Difficulty increases overtime so the player is encouraged not to spend too long in each level, it has a substantial impact on the game as enemies gain lot more health and deal more damage overtime, special element variant enemies spawn that have special effects and booted stats, more difficult types of enemies spawn as well (though this is massively tied to the current level) and the spawnrate of enemies increases overtime. The extends to the boss summoned when charging the teleporter, not only will the boss be stronger but multiple of the boss may spawn too.
To balance this out, enemies drop much more gold and experience.
Difficulty scaling is a key element I would love to include in my game as it’ll introduce an element of change so the player needs to try harder to progress further and further, without this I fear the game will be a literal elevator simulator.
An items system is also a very powerful element to make roguelikes more interesting to the player, a randomised way to allow the player to become stronger and needing to adapt to their strongest element based on that has always been a successful way to keep games fun.
Risk of Rain 2 has enough chests in a playthrough and drops that you’re bound to get some of the items that you’re after and players will tend to keep playing hoping to get the items they’re after for a perfect run. It works both ways where some people are invested in creating a certain build where certain items synergize insanely well with a certain ability so they can smoothly sail into say the 3 hour mark of a single game, OR the player doesn’t care and just likes colleting the items because they’re getting statistically stronger regardless.
It’d be good to note how the game decided what enemies to spawn, when and where. They’re always within a certain radius of the player and seem to spawn in waves, you can have a quiet moment of few spawns only to then see a lot of enemy spawn sporadically.
In reflection so far, some of these aspects could be applied to my game.
Gold and experience gained on killing an enemy is a key element I already planned on adding to my game, a little particle effect would be solid to convey this on every enemy death.
Difficulty scaling would be easy to add, create a variable with a default value of 1 that increases by maybe 0.1 every minute, enemy health and damage could be multiple by this value, gold and experience aswell at a greater rate.
Items are a nice bit of spice to gameplay too but will require a lot more coding to work, and the impact they have may not make the game that much more engaging if they just increase a number in the backend.
Factors that could be changed include: Spell damage, rate of fire, projectile speed, spell size, mana cost, maximum mana/health, mana/health regen rate, movement speed.
The list goes on but there’d need to be an item for each stat I want to provide a buff for. This could work but it’ll remain stretch goal.