A Rogue Like is a kind of RPG that is built on the philosophy of YOLO: You Only Live Once. It can be turn-based or action-, it can be 2D or Three-Quarters View, but the most important part is that it leverages Procedural Generation: You start a character, are thrown into a series of Randomly Generated Levels, and experience Permadeath when you fail... at which point you start the core loop all over again.
Be sure to check out So You Want To Write a Story for writing advice in general, and So You Want To Write an RPG for advice on writing RPG's specifically. Since Roguelikes don't have a hard-and-fast genre as much as they do a set-style, you might want to check out our tips for writing a certain kind of story (ex, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, etc) to inform this direction.
There's some overlap between Roguelikes and Soulslikes, so maybe take a gander at So You Want To Write a Souls-Like.
Necessary Tropes
- Anti-Frustration Features: Like Soulslikes, a good balance between difficulty and fairness is essential for a proper roguelike.
- Continuing is Painful: If you can continue at all, you're punished quite heavily for it.
- Death Tropes: Your character is expected to die eventually.
- RPGs Equal Combat: Nobody plays a Rogelike for the story beats. They're purely focused on a primary gameplay loop of fight-loot-advance-repeat.
- The Many Deaths of You: Fell down a pit or stepped in a trap, or just got beaten into poo by a mook. Or mainlined too much Chaos magic and melted. Or made one too many trades with the demon shopkeeper and got Dragged Off to Hell. Or got drunk, vomited while asleep, and drowned. The potential for Yet Another Stupid Death to claim a character is endless.
Choices, Choices
The term "Roguelike" is pretty broad. It's less of a genre than an archetype. "A Roguelike" ranges from fantasy to science fiction and back. As the writer, it's up to you to determine what kind of roguelike it is. Brush up on the relevant tropes of the actual genre of the kind of game you want to have.You're going to want to have a variety of playstyles so players will stay interested even when they have to play through the "same" levels over and over again. The usual method is to let players choose a race and class that determines what abilities, strengths, and weaknesses they will have.
- A roguelike can have "hard" or "soft" classes, which determines how strictly the player will be limited by their choice.
- Games like Nethack and Angband have "hard" classes, so a physical-focused class will never be able to use magic, or will only have access to a limited selection of spells, while a wizard will always struggle to properly use strong weapons or armor.
- Games like Dungeon Crawl and Elona have "soft" classes, which merely decide what you start off with, but not what you'll be able to do later on. There's nothing stopping a warrior from eventually learning magic and becoming a Magic Knight, or a wizard training with a bow to deal with magic-resistant foes.
- Some games lack classes altogether. For example, Brogue always starts you as a rogue, but lets you choose your playstyle based on the items you find and choose to pick up.
- Roguelikes tend to be strictly single-player games, so don't worry too much about balance. If a class is clearly stronger than the rest, it might be useful to help new players learn more about the game. If your game is good enough, then players will eventually try winning with one of the weaker classes as a Self-Imposed Challenge. You might want to clearly label if some classes are supposed to be better or worse, lest players complain "Warrior is OP" and "why can't I win the first level with the Fisherman class?"
As mentioned, your character typically suffers Permadeath. However, this has also been mated with the "Groundhog Day" Loop idea, allowing for a certain amount of plot and Character Development. Additionally, it opens up new avenues of gameplay: persistent leveling.
- In the stereotypical roguelike, you roll a completely new character every time you start the core loop. Every time you begin a session, your character starts from the same place.
- More modern roguelikes, such as Hades, have persistent progression: the Player Character starts the dungeon over each time, but he can power up his weapons, relics and self in between runs. Every time he does another dungeon delve, his starting Power Levels are just a little bit higher than they were last time.
As mentioned, the dungeon itself tends to be procedurally generated. How much do you want to play with this?
- The problem with truly procedurally-generated dungeons is that they can be Unintentionally Unwinnable, at least unless you design subroutines and automated tests which determine that whatever Bizarrchitecture was generated can actually be navigated.
- The Torchlight games avert this by instead having randomly-selected rooms — really, in this game's case, groups of rooms — that link together. This guarantees that maps never have dead ends, but also means that, past a certain level of exposure, The Player already knows how to unlock this secret door.
- Torchlight also has a few "landmark" levels that are the same every run, typically containing a major boss.
How far do you want to take random generation?
- What about the monsters? Obviously, no one wants to step out of the starting room and just immediately meet a death minion from hell (except maybe Soulslike players), but there is clear design space in partially randomizing the stats of the mooks or even the mooks themselves that you're going to run into.
- Randomly Generated Loot? Note that Diablo combined this with Socketed Equipment to create one of the most addictive gaming experiences in history.
- How much control do you have over your character's design? Are there classes, and if so, does The Player get to choose which one they're going to use? Are their abilities, and if so, does The Player get to choose which ones they're going to be assigned?
- Any available perks should absolutely be randomly chosen, but how much do you want to clue The Player in on this? Hades uses this to guide its levels: the door to each "room" has an icon on it, telling The Player what they'll find behind it. This allows The Player to make strategic choices depending on what's being offered to them.
And lastly, it's been mentioned that a roguelike is, to a certain extent, not a genre, but rather a super-genre that a number of other game styles can be merged into. So, what are you looking for?
- Turn-based RPG? The Trope Namer Rogue absolutely was, but what kind of game engine are we talking about here?
- Straight RPG? Again, Rogue did that.
- Deckbuilding game? Slay the Spire.
- 4X? I mean, isn't basically every 4X game a roguelike in its own way?: you pick a starting civilization and everything else is in the hands of the Random Number God.
- Real-time action game? Diablo, the game so influential that, for about a decade, every roguelike was ripping off Diablo instead. ("Classical" roguelikes have since seen a resurgence.)
- First-person shooter? Ever heard of Borderlands, the Looter Shooter Trope Codifier? It didn't have randomly-generated levels — which are hard enough in 2D, so no one's exactly accusing them of being lazy — but they've proven that every other portion of the genre works in a FPS environment, so they're most of the way there.
- And more! The sky's the limit!
Pitfalls
- It's Hard, So It Sucks!: It's common to see "99% of people can't beat level 3" used as a badge of honour, but most players will get frustrated and leave if they can't beat it eventually.
- Yet Another Stupid Death: As mentioned above, older Roguelikes delighted in Ass Pulling cheap deaths like a Killer DM who's had to foot the pizza bill. Most modern Roguelikes will make it so that the only person you can blame a failed run on is yourself.
Potential Subversions
- Macro Game: A lot of Roguelikes allow you to buy permanent upgrades from a between-tries (colliquially called a "run") shop in exchange for a, for lack of a better term, "Premium currency," if not automatically unlocking stuff as you progress. This allows you to slowly unlock more things to help you on your quest. The problem is, that this virtually garuntees victory after you've unlocked everything.
- Randomly Generated Levels and Randomly Generated Loot: While Roguelike levels and loot are often randomly generated, it might be worth it to try hand-crafting some things.
Writers' Lounge
Suggested Themes and Aesops
- Perserverance in the case of seeming futility.
- Was It Really Worth It?: After getting squished into pulp over and over, climbing to a slightly higher rung in the ladder, you've finally gotten to the end and killed the BBEG... Now what? Every time you blink you see an old trauma, and hear your own dying scream when its quiet. Wouldn't you have rather stayed home?
Potential Motifs
- Fling a Light into the Future: The game is a relay-race set over a long period of time, with a MacGuffin that explains a threat and how to deal with it. The problem is getting it to where it's meant to go...
- "Groundhog Day" Loop: Why exactly are you trying to beat down a brick wall using only your face, anyways? You're reliving the same twelve minutes/ day/ etc over and over.
- Have a Nice Death: With death being on the menu so much, it's inevitable that your players will get repeatedly [synonymn for "being crushed"] into [synonymn for "thick paste"]. A little bit of levity goes a long way.
- Power at a Price: While a player might want an invulnerable hero, just as many will want a Glass Cannon build with one HP and a fireball spell that leaves a mushroom cloud. Remember: The best defense is a good offense.
Suggested Plots
- A trend has emerged of fusing Roguelike elements to different kinds of games. FPS is common, but strategy games, for example, are kind of hard to do since they focus on entire armies, rather than one person who's been set up to fail. Like Soulslikes, you're focusing on one poor schmuck getting mashed into chutney over and over, instead of an army.
- How about taking the "randomly generated" part of the roguelikes to a whole new level? The entire dungeon lacks any damn lick of sense, and it knows it: You could be traversing a desert on one room and a blizzard in another, and things just seem to lack any rhyme or reason. It all comes to a head with the boss fights; After completing a run and defeating a set of bosses, you may start a new game and find out that the entire sequence of bosses has been completely jumbled around again. Your player character may lampshade why the Final Boss of the previous run is suddenly now the Warmup Boss, why the Evil Genius and the Dark Action Girl suddenly have their places switched, and why all of this is slowly starting to make less and less licks of any damn sense...
Departments
Set Designer / Location Scout
- Chaos Architecture: Most Roguelike dungeons change, often drastically, between each playthrough.
Props Department
- Weapons flavoured to the genre of game you're making. Hell, mix-and-match, and have a foolish Samurai warrior weilding a shotgun and hand grenades instead of, or in addition to, a magic sword.
Costume Designer
- Again, tailor or mix as you like. Some older Roguelikes had ASCII Art "graphics," representing your character with an "@" symbol (because it looks like a bird's-eye view of someone wearing a big hat) and monsters by their first initial, although the trend has been to move away from this, as the text-as-graphics hack was a method to get the games to play without a GUI on a college/workplace mainframe. Since everything has a graphics card (outside of, funny enough, workplace mainframes), this is less acceptable.
- Once you've nailed down your aesthetic, peices of equipment for your character sheet (hats, armor, gloves, etc) that give the player an edge. Maybe try giving equipment that has a Necessary Drawback. Shoes with heelies that extend your dodge, a hat that causes friendly maggots to spawn from your kills, or a vest that halves your fire damage while doubling your ice damage, that kind of thing.
Casting Director
- A Death Seeker or someone with Resurrective Immortality for the protagonist.
Stunt Department
- You'd better get someone ready to die over and over again.
Extra Credit
Honourable Mentions
- Rogue: The great grandpappy, against which all others are measured. It's the Trope Namer and Genre Popularizer note : "roguelikes" are "like Rogue." An ASCII graphics Dungeon Crawler RPG that pioneered having Permadeath and randomly-generated everything.
- Ancient Domains of Mystery: An evolution of the classic roguelike formula, Ancient Domains of Mystery actually has an extensive story revolving around defeating the machinations of Chaos. While it doesn't have a Macro Game with persistent upgrades, it has an evolving trait system revolving around your character's Chaos Corruption stat.
The Greats
- The Binding of Isaac: Grim, Religious Horror-flavoured atmosphere informs the locations of each Level of Hell you need to escape to reach the end of the game. By completing certain criteria, you unlock new characters with new playstyles. This is what most people think of when they hear the term "Roguelike."
- Enter the Gungeon: Probably the pinnacle of Nintendo Hard action roguelikes, Gungeon ups the ante in terms of demanding good strategy and skill due to being a Bullet Hell. Much like Isaac, it has a smorgasbord of replayability few other roguelikes have been able to match.
- FTL: Faster Than Light: An example of the "roguelikes crossed with another type of game" subgenre (in this case, a sci-fi Standard Starship Scuffle simulator), the game allows you to make descisions based around fighting, diplomacy-ing, or just flat-out running as fast as possible to the goal to win.
- Hades: Explains why the protagonist can't die (he's literally the son of the Greek god of the dead) and why he's willing to get mulched into goo over and over (annoying his father).
The Epic Fails
- Like its cousin the Soulslike, it's not so much that good roguelikes are especially rare, but that the mediocre makes up the majority of the entries. Since roguelike is such a popular genre, it takes a good one to rise above the rest.
