Concept - Arcanorum/rogueworld GitHub Wiki

Pitch

Rogueworld is a subversive take on the roguelike genre, one that takes the ending/death of the game world and the player's own character and turns it from the failure state into the primary goal, while also expanding on the survival aspect by limiting the player in various ways and requiring them to work with other players to cover each other's weaknesses.

• Players are spawned into a series of procedurally generated game worlds.
• They must hunt down and defeat some end boss that exists somewhere out in the world.
  • e.g. The Ender Dragon in Minecraft, but featuring a wider roster of potential bosses.
• When the boss is defeated, that world will then be considered completed/saved/rescued, and a new world generation will be triggered, with players being prompted to enter this next iteration, leaving their current character behind.
• Players' characters don't transfer between worlds, but a player may recreate a previous character build, or try something different entirely.
  • e.g. Experimenting with different champions/builds in each match of a MOBA, as you level up and acquire gear & abilities, but still start from scratch every match.
• When dying on a world, the player's current character is erased. Their character cannot be respawned.
• The player can still spawn again on this same world, but as a new character, giving them a new opportunity to try again, either with minor adjustments to their previous character's strategy based on how they performed in their previous run, or even to fulfil an entirely different role within the team based on what is in-demand by other players at the time.
  • e.g. Similar to class switching in team based shooters like TF2/Overwatch/Battlefield to better balance a team composition as needed.

Effective teamwork is essential to the players' shared end goal, with the boss generated with each game world intended to be too powerful to face alone.

Inspirations

• Realm of the Mad God
  • Pros:
    • Drop in and play, straight into the game, no lengthy exposition and character creation to get through first.
    • Light RPG elements with basic character customisation.
    • Emphasis on replayability by unlocking new classes to try.
    • Pseudo-round based, with the "realms" that are wiped upon defeating the end boss.
  • Cons:
    • Most maps and enemies can feel very samey. Every realm is approached in the same way.
    • Large player cap, easy for players to just overwhelm challenges through numbers.
• Minecraft
  • Pros:
    • Primitive resource gathering, intuitive to tell roughly what something is and what it can be used for.
    • Great variety in world generations and things to discover. Freedom to explore an unknown world. Constant sense of adventure.
    • Resources don't regenerate so players need to keep seeking out new sources.
    • Extensive modding support and vibrant user generated content community.
  • Cons:
    • Easy to optimise the fun out of the game and make many tasks trivial. Hunger quickly becomes a non-issue with only a small farm.
    • Base game can feel very shallow/directionless once you have beaten the Ender Dragon a few times.
    • Perhaps intense early-game, can be challenging for brand new players not to die in their first few nights.
• League of Legends
  • Pros:
    • Round based play where you get a semi-blank canvas to build on and experiment with each game, in the form of a character with pre-defined stats that can be augmented by the player as the game progresses.
    • Fairly slow early game that gives some opportunity for socialising and strategising, before ramping up in pace and intensity.
    • Players start off very limited in their abilities and gradually unlock things, easy to learn a new character as you play.
    • Team based role specialisation.
  • Cons:
    • Laning phase of each match leads to a lot of toxicity and anti-team sentiment, plays for most of the match like 5 separate 1v1s rather than a 5v5.
    • Very twitch based play and high skill floor, high barrier of entry for people who aren't such big gamers, less appealing and accessible to the more casual io game crowd.
• Starve.io, Moomoo.io

Various co-op and/or party games

• Overcooked
  • Pros:
    • Chaotic and stressful at times, but still exciting in the moment and fun to look back on.
  • Cons:
    • Players can get in each others' way, communication is often the biggest bottleneck, need to be sat next to each other.
• Portal 2 co-op
  • Pros:
    • Players need to work together to figure out certain problems, requires input from everyone to progress.
    • Little twitch/reflex skill needed for most puzzles.
  • Cons:
    • Linear story and single solutions to fixed problems, once you have gotten through it there isn't any reason to play it again.
• Stardew Valley multiplayer
  • Pros:
    • General tone and sense of community, it can be nice to just have other players to chill with.
  • Cons:
    • Other players aren't really needed for anything as such, and the whole game can be played just fine solo.

Goal

Rogueworld is a project with three main development objectives:

• Make the creation of online multiplayer browser games more accessible and understandable to those just starting out, through demonstrating the application of relevant software development techniques within the context of a working product of a non-trivial scope, and to serve as a potential portfolio piece for those capable of and interested in contributing to open-source software.
• Fill an apparent gap in the browser gaming space for an adventure game with an emphasis on teamwork and fostering positive player interactions and community building, that also facilitates a simple drop-in-and-play format with minimal barriers to entry.
• A personal challenge of game design, software engineering, and project management.

Genre

• Co-op adventure game, with RPG elements, that happens to be online multiplayer, but not quite an MMORPG (less World of Warcraft, more Guild Wars).
• The RPG genre is a good fit for these design pillars as it can easily facilitate:
  • Specialisation: Class specific bonuses.
  • Dependency: Drawbacks to each class, so reliance on others to cover your class's weaknesses.
  • Purpose: Clearly defined roles within a team, based on class.
  • Replayability: There is always a new adventure waiting, and a new way in which it can be played by trying a different character build enabled by character customisation.
  • Exploration: There are a lot of character build permutations to experiment with and explore the effectiveness of. Players are presented with many opportunities to try new builds, as they have to create a new character for each world generation, and can be enticed through occasional random bonuses to different character customisation options to try new character builds they may have otherwise not considered.

Target audience

• 16-30+. Old enough to have an attention span long enough to last around 1 hour for a full game, and also up to those old enough to have other things going on in life (jobs, hobbies, maybe kids), where a game like this would easily fit into a limited amount of free time.
• Plus immediate friends and family. People someone would want to play with.
• Ideally played for a full session in the afternoon, at home with other people (or at someone else's house).
• Quite often these browser games are played by kids at school/college in a library or computer lab while on their lunch break, but given the more involved nature of this kind of RPG, this is not the intended time when it would be played.
• The game is not about long-term progression of a single character/account, so doesn't suit being played over many short periods to gain a little bit of progress periodically.

Platform

• Desktop browser (as per most "io" games).
• Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge (with varying support for other browsers depending on how awkward they are to support).
• No immediate mobile plans.
  • RPGs often need to be designed in a way that is very specific to the needs of mobile, and it is easy to tell when a game that is playable on desktop was designed for mobile.
  • Despite the fact that most browser games technically also work on mobile browsers, this isn't the intended experience.
  • Focus is on making a good game on one platform for now.
  • Mobile would be beneficial though, given how easy it would be for a group of people to get together in-person to play a session. Otherwise hauling desktops around would be impractical, with laptops being very situational (kind of need to know you are going to be playing this game somewhere to know to bring it).

Player count

• Up to about 10(?) in each world instance.
• Still playable for a much smaller group of more experienced players.
• Should align with The Tribe pillars:
  • Purpose: Not so many players in an world instance that individual members lose purpose among the masses. Each player should feel like a valuable and useful member of the group, and that they can have a real impact.
  • Specialisation: Not so few players in a world instance that players have to be generalists and do too many things themselves. There should be enough room in a group for there to be enough players for each player to be able to specialise in some way, since there are enough players specialising in other things for their weaknesses to be covered by someone else.
• For pick-up-groups/playing with randoms online, there should be more chances to encounter the same players multiple times, and form more meaningful connections, instead of most other players just being passing acquaintances that are only cared about for the duration of a dungeon raid or PvP match.
• Easy enough to design specific challenges around, rather than players just being to overwhelm challenges through sheer numbers.
• A multiplayer RPG, but not massive.