At the end of October, I shared some preliminary plans for my NaGa DeMon 2020 project. Once the calendar flipped to November, I started work on a roguelike. After a little over a week of work (off and on), it looked like this:
I made this in Godot Engine using Kenney's 1-Bit roguelike pack. As I mentioned before, I have never made a classic roguelike, and it was fun to build this project up this far. Getting into using BSP for dungeon generation was quite interesting, but I hit some serious technical and algorithmic frustrations in creating useful tunnels between rooms. This took some of the wind out of my sails, in large part because it made me face the fact that, following this path, I would end up with basically "NetHack but worse." I love NetHack, but I didn't really have any inspiration for my roguelike that would make it stand apart. It didn't have a hook, as Josh Ge put it in his inspirational talk.
I let my wander into the realms of hooks, and a thought crossed my mind that's been flitting about intermittently: what happens if you combine PbtA-style action resolution with a CRPG? Regular readers may recall that my NaGa DeMon project last year was a PbtA campy superhero RPG. I am not aware of any game projects, even experimental ones, that attempted to put PbtA mechanisms into a video game; small experiments may be out there, but I think if there was a major one I would have heard about it. In any case, this line of thought combined nicely with the roguelike mindset I was already in, and I found myself thinking about the interface and style of Hero Generations. I have also been reading about Dungeon World and prepping to play the Unlimited Dungeons hack with my family, so that was on my mind.
Working along these lines, I built a prototype in about a week that looked like this:
It actually looked a little better than that, but not much. It seems I abandoned this one in the middle of working on a feature branch, so you cannot see the text indication that there are some goblins in the dungeon.
What made me abandon this project was a similar sense of being directionless that hit me a few days into the development of the earlier prototype. I implemented action selection for actions akin to Dungeon World's Hack-n-Slash and Discern Realities, as well as Escape and Advance moves for dungeon-delving. Each of these supported the three traditional PbtA roll outcomes of failure, partial success, and success—an important and symbolic part of the game that I have written about before. Middling successes resulted in a variety of options that depended on the contents of the current room.
This all worked in a technical sense, but it was just a mechanical toy: I didn't have a goal besides seeing what happens if I did it. Indeed, I think both this prototype and the previous one were fun implementation projects that merited more attention to paper prototyping. I think part of me knew for both of these that, if I had spent more time paper prototyping, I would come to the clear conclusion that I could make these things but that I didn't have much reason to do so.
After stopping work on this prototype, then, I went back to first principles: what project is exciting enough to me that, with only half the month left to go and another pile of looming work, would keep me inspired to finish strongly? I decided to go back to the first idea that I had written about in October, that idea that has been pulling at my interest for some time: a card game about manipulating the relationships of powerful characters who are not controlled by any player directly.
I started work on that other project in earnest late last week, and today, I published v0.1 of the rules as a print-and-play game. The working title is "Intrigue," and you can download the rules and cards on the Web site. The graphic design is rudimentary, and there is a complete absence of illustration. That said, I've been happy with the game in playtesting. The story of this game's development, including twists, turns, and technology, will be the subject of a future post.
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