Video Game / Tiny Rogues

Tiny Rogues is a Roguelike Bullet Hell shooter by RubyDev, released on Steam in Early Access on 23 September 2022. While appearing to be a simple retro shooter on the surface, under the bonnet it features a complex and detailed character engine, with hundreds of individual stats, abilities, and progression mechanics.

The player must battle through 10 floors of 10 rooms each, fighting a single enemy wave on each one. Defeating all enemies yields the room's reward, which is chosen by the player depending on which door they chose in the previous room, allowing the player some control over their resources. In addition, the game provides luck manipulation in the form of magical dice, which can be used to reroll outcomes in the hopes of gaining something more favorable.

To fight the enemies, the player is equipped with a weapon, either melee, ranged, or magic — although an unusual aspect of the game is that all weapons, even melee weapons, manifest as ranged attacks (although melee weapons tend to be shorter range). The game has a huge arsenal of weapons of many different types that the player can obtain, upgrade, and enchant, each with different attack styles and proficiencies. The player can also switch between weapons on the fly if they desire.

Throughout the game, the player must defeat bosses to collect their souls, which can be used as a persistent currency to unlock new gifts and characters between playthroughs.

Tiny Rogues can be purchased on Steam here.

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Tiny Rogues has examples of the following tropes:

• Abnormal Ammo: Quite a few weapons:
  • The Piranha Gun shoots piranhas.
  • The Candy Scroll rains candy from the air.
  • The Rubber Duck Scroll rains rubber ducks from the air.
• After Boss Recovery: The Cleric has this as their signature trait — they regain 3 hearts of health when they progress to the next floor. Other characters will have to patch themselves up as best they can.
• Anti-Frustration Features: Enemy projectiles vanish as soon as the last enemy on the screen is defeated, preventing any post-victory deaths.
  • Your character auto-equips any new equipment that they have a free slot for.
• Area of Effect:
  • Many enemy attacks have an area of effect. If the effect would be difficult to see coming, the game warns you with a circular flash of danger highlighting the area where the attack is about to take place.
  • Several player weapons also have explosive area of effect damage.
  • The Bell, in particular, radiates concentric circles of sound waves.
• Auto-Revive: The Cleric Robe saves you from death once per floor.
• Barrier Warrior: One of the Pharaoh boss's powers is to temporarily enclose himself in a protective magical shield.
• Beware the Nice Ones: The Mandrake is apparently a peaceful nature-loving spirit — until you anger it, at which point it loses its calm demeanor.
  Mandrake: Who cares about nature's peace! You made me angry. This is now personal!
• Body Armor as Hit Points: Your armor points are essentially an additional pool of Hit Points, except that armor can be restored more easily and cheaply than your regular health. Some effects are influenced by the amount of armor you have.
• Booze-Based Buff: Drinking alcohol increases your Tipsiness stat, which increases your damage dealing ability for a time, but otherwise has no drawbacks. However, the amount of alcohol you can tolerate is determined by your health — tough characters can down a few pints, but weaker ones like mages won't be able to drink as much before it starts harming them.
• Boss Banter: All of the bosses get a few lines of taunting dialogue for their fights, and some make angry noises while fighting you.
• Bullfight Boss: The Minotaur, unsurprisingly, which charges at you and unleashes a damaging wave when it stops. In the second phase of its attack, its charge pinballs around the arena and becomes more difficult to dodge.
  • The sleeping bear miniboss also attacks like this.
• Cartoon Meat: The Strength-increasing consumables are classic cartoon depictions of steaks and legs of meat.
• Cartridges in Flight: A somewhat strange grenade variation of this trope — the Grenade Launcher fires hand grenades which still have the pin and clip attached. To add to the confusion, the grenades don't have a timed fuze, but instead detonate on impact.
• Chain Lightning: Some weapons produce arcs of lightning that jump to nearby enemies.
• Chest Monster: Some rooms contain a chest as a reward for defeating all the enemies, and on rare occasions, the chest itself is the enemy, in a classic revealed-mimic guise. When it fights you, it uses attacks appropriate to the kind of chest it's mimicking — for example, the Alchemy Chest mimic lobs potion flasks at you.
• Close-Range Combatant: Some items and abilities provide close-range benefits, allowing characters to specialize in melee combat.
• Creepy Cemetery: Or rather creepy crypt, as it's underground, but The Boneyard fills this role in game, featuring skeletons, tombstones, and various undead.
• Crosshair Aware: If an Area of Effect attack would be too difficult to see coming, the game warns you with a circular flash of danger, highlighting the area where the attack is about to happen. Similar warnings are given prior to dash attacks and lasers, and confetti cannons have conical danger areas warning you of the spray of confetti that will come out. Additionally, the Phoenix boss has an inverse Area of Effect attack which the game warns you of by highlighting everywhere except for a small radius around the boss.
• Death from Above:
  • Scroll weapons call down attacks from the air. (It's not clear exactly where the attacks are coming from, considering that the game takes place underground...)
  • After the Minotaur completes its charge and hits the wall, a cascade of falling rocks will come from the ceiling.
  • The Phoenix boss has a Meteor-Summoning Attack that rains meteors from the air.
• Dracolich: Geryon, Death's Dragon (of course) and Gate Guardian for the Shadow Plane.
• Dual Boss: The Gargoyles, a pair of brothers who defend the exit from The Catacombs. Kill one, and the remaining one will become enraged.
• Dump Stat: The game takes some measures to avoid this. Firstly, weapons can be influenced by multiple stats, making it viable to generalize. Secondly, any item that increases a stat also increases your experience level, so it can still be worth getting a stat booster even if it's not a stat you're specializing in.
  • However, the player can now invoke this trope with certain traits that double the bonuses received from one stat while negating the effects from the other two.
• Dungeon Shop: Most floors contain one at some point, offering a small selection of items to players who have managed to accumulate enough money. You can also find pawn shops that will buy your unwanted equipment.
• Elite Mooks: Some levels feature "Enchanted" enemies that have been granted additional lethal powers.
• Emergency Weapon: If you don't have any weapon equipped, your character falls back to a low-damage, short-ranged fist attack. The Between Heaven and Hell update even gives the player options to take a viable barehanded build to the endgame thanks to gloves providing additional scaling.
• Enemies with Death: All of the player characters; Death is the initial final boss, and Primal Death is the final boss of the Shadow Planes (the lawful route).
• Equipment Upgrade: All weapons can be upgraded up to 3 times to increase their deadliness. Melee weapons can be upgraded a fourth time. Weapons can also be enchanted to give them additional boosts.
• Excalibur in the Stone: You can pull Excalibur from a stone in one of the events.
• Genie in a Bottle: You can encounter a Benevolent Genie in a lamp in an event in The Desert. It grants you a single wish of either Wealth or Power.
• Guide Dang It!: The game uses the term "DoT" quite freely but doesn't explain what it stands for. It means "Damage over Time", and refers to weapons that continue to deal damage after their initial strike, such as burning or poison attacks.
• Guns Akimbo: The Double Crossbows are a pair of tiny crossbows that are wielded one in each hand.
• Grenade Launcher: A gun-type weapon in game that fires grenades.
• Healing Potion: There are no consumable healing potions in the game, but the Health Flask acts as a single-use, refillable health potion.
• Healing Spring: Healing fountains give you back one heart of health, and also refill your Health Flask for later use.
• Hearts Are Health: As well as normal red hearts representing hit points, there are also blue Soul Hearts, which stack with red hearts but operate under different rules.
• Heart Container: Usually offered as a high-level reward, these permanently increase your maximum health.
• Hit Points: While the game does track numeric hit points, these are abstracted to the player as hearts, with each heart representing 1 HP (originally 20, before Between Heaven and Hell). In addition to the player's normal health, there are also a number of additional sources of protection which are functionally equivalent to hit points and stack with them, but which follow different rules.
  • Armor can be refreshed at blacksmith anvils or with Repair Powder.
  • Block is refreshed at the start of each floor.
  • Evasion is refreshed 5 combat rooms after being expended.
  • Suppression only functions during boss fights.
• Homing Projectile: Several weapons, usually magical ones, fire projectiles with some degree of homing. Some enemies have homing attacks too.
• King Mook: The King Ooze is a boss version of the smaller ooze enemies found in The Deep Dark.
• Lethal Joke Item: The Cluckeye Bow is a pathetic weapon that's outclassed by even the Ranger's starting bow — but it has a small chance to release a chicken that homes in on enemies and deals a massive Area of Effect explosion which does 1700% damage.
• Lethal Lava Land: Floor 7 is The Volcano, full of fiery enemies — although, surprisingly, not a whole lot of lava, although you can still encounter lava during the "Lava Enchanted" Random Event.
• Life Meter: All enemies have them to show how close you are to defeating them. Bosses have two, one for each phase of the boss fight.
• Limited-Use Magical Device: All characters have a Health Flask, which restores one heart of health when consumed, and can't be used again unless it is refilled. Opportunities to refill it are uncommon and unpredictable, so it has to be used sparingly. It also takes a couple of seconds to drink, so it's not much good in the heat of battle unless you can somehow find a quiet moment.
• Long-Range Fighter: Some weapons are long range, and some equipment and abilities enable you to deal greater damage at long range or give you the agility to stay out of range.
• Luck Manipulation Mechanic: The player has a bag of magical dice of various types, which allow various random aspects of the game to be rerolled if the player is looking for a different outcome. Most commonly, this is used to change the exits from each room to give the player a more useful reward. They can also be used to change the selections offered in shops, change the choices of traits given on level up, or to alter the traits you already have.
• Luck Stat: The Luck stat influences probabilities by forcing the game to reroll outcomes and give you the most favorable one. The higher the stat, the more rerolls the game will do. Luck also influences your lucky hit chance, which refills critical hit rolls (making critical hits more likely) and interacts with various traits and equipment to confer beneficial effects.
• Ludicrous Gibs: When you die, your character explodes into a huge shower of pixellated blood — which is a bit incongruous, given that there's otherwise no actual blood in-game.
• Magic Music: Music can be used as an attack in game, and is tied to your mana. The Bard can additionally choose from a list of songs gathered during a playthrough which grant a variety of buffs while dealing sound damage, which predominantly comes from instrument weapons.
• Magic Potion: Several different potions are available, providing some kind of useful effect that lasts for several rooms, unless you have the trait which makes potion effects permanent. There are also resins, which act like potions but apply the effect to your weapons instead (and there's a trait which makes those permanent as well).
• Magikarp Power: Melee weapons are restricted by their short range. However, they are comparatively easy to upgrade beyond +3 thanks to the item required for it being rather accessible — guns require Illegal Gun Parts, which you'll only see from a special NPC in the tavern or maybe from the black market^note and either way, your alignment is pushed towards evil, which might be beneficial or problematic, depending on your equipment, class, and desired endgame, and a special blacksmith can potentially upgrade any weapon up to +4, but you're far from guaranteed to see it on any given run.
• Mana Meter: Comes into play with any weapon with Mana Drain, depleting a set amount with every attack and granting extra damage as long as that amount can be paid. However, being in 'mana burnout' does not make attacking useless, and there's items which can actually grant benefits while in that state.
• Meteor-Summoning Attack: The signature move of the Phoenix boss, who liberally bombards their arena with them.
• Mini-Boss:
  • The infrequent cockatrice enemy, initially encountered by itself in early levels but can be found in groups in later ones. All of its attacks are cursed, it has a powerful and difficult-to-avoid omnidirectional blast, and it can also target you with lasers.
  • The chest mimics also act as minibosses, fighting alone with boss-like dashes and powerful projectile attacks.
  • The sleeping bear event pits you against a single, tough bear enemy.
• Molotov Cocktail: A ranged weapon that deals an Area of Effect attack and double fire damage.
• Monster Is a Mommy: The Spider Queen, who threatens to feed you to her children.
• Mook Maker: The Lich boss can summon spirits to attack you.
• Multishot: Several of the bow and crossbow weapons are specifically designed to fire multiple arrows at once, such as the Doubleshot Bow, Twinshot Crossbow, or the ridiculous Octoshot Crossbow.
• Music Is Eighth Notes: Music-based weapons fire out music notes that deal damage.
• "No More Holding Back" Speech: Dealing enough damage to a boss will anger it and unleash its full fury, with appropriate Boss Banter.
  Queen Bee: You should have escaped while you could. I am done holding back!
• Orbiting Particle Shield: The Pharaoh boss can protect itself with a dense circle of orbiting particles.
• Playing with Fire: The Pyromancer's whole deal, naturally. They have an innate ability to imbue weapons with fire, and start with items that make fire even more deadly.
• Power at a Price: The Cursed Shrines give you a choice of accepting a permanent, minor drawback in exchange for a permanent upgrade.
• Power-Up Food: The stat-increasing consumables are all food items: steaks for +1 Strength, pears for +1 Dexterity, candies for +1 Intelligence.
• Random Event: Some screens are "Enchanted" and contain enhanced enemies or additional dangers.
• Rare Candy: The Power Shard increases your experience by one when consumed. The Power Gem increases it by 5.
• Real-Time Weapon Change: The player usually accumulates several weapons over the course of a playthrough; they can switch to any weapon in their inventory at any time, which can be useful for exploiting enemy vulnerabilities. The Green Wool Hoodie supports this further by giving you a short ability boost whenever you switch weapons.
• Red Is Violent: Bosses' Life Meters turn red when they become angry.
• Reference Overdosed: there's a good reason the Shout-Out section is so huge.
• Retraux: The game uses simplistic low-resolution pixel art, with a bright limited color palette reminiscent of ZX Spectrum graphics. It also makes widespread use of the classic Amiga font, and has chiptune music throughout. It even emulates the scanlines and distortions of early CRT monitors.
• Schizo Tech: Alongside the typical fantasy swords, bows, and magic wands, you can also obtain modern firearms, laser guns, rocket launchers, and even a railgun.
• Sequential Boss: All bosses have two phases, the second of which is a more dangerous version of the first.
• Shaping Your Attacks: All attacks in the game are ranged, even ones that you wouldn't expect to be, like bare fists. If the attack is with a melee weapon, it usually spawns a projectile in the shape of that weapon, or a simple crescent Sword Beam.
• Shockwave Stomp: The Spider Queen does one after landing from her ascent.
• Shout-Out:
  • The game has several references to other indie roguelites, but none moreso than Terraria:
    • The weapon enchantments use the same adjective-noun format similar to Terraria's item enchantments, and shares some of the same adjectives.
    • The Vilethorn weapon behaves like the weapon of the same name from Terraria.
    • The Jester Bow fires piercing arrows, similar to how Terraria's Jester Arrows pierce through enemies, and the arrows have a similar visual appearance, leaving a trail of sparkling stars.
    • Scroll weapons rain projectiles from the air to land at the point where you target them, similar to falling star weapons in Terraria. The Comet Scroll, in particular, rains falling stars.
    • The Magical Boomerang looks and behaves exactly like Terraria's Enchanted Boomerang.
    • There's also the Wooden Boomerang, the starting weapon for the Wanderer, which looks and behaves like Terraria's Wooden Boomerang, which is itself an unenchanted Enchanted Boomerang.
    • And there's also a Flamarang, which does fire damage.
    • The Thorn Chakrams look and behave like the weapon of the same name from Terraria.
    • The Poisonous Concoction resembles the Toxic Flask.
    • There's also an Endurance Potion, although it works differently — it lets you briefly defy death, while Terraria's just reduces damage taken.
    • You can get a Shark-Tooth Necklace which looks similar to Terraria's, although it has a different effect.
    • You can get a Chlorophyte bow, chlorophyte being a high-level ore in Terraria.
    • The vine enemies in The Jungle look a lot like the Snatchers from Terraria's jungle biome.
    • The Jungle also contains hives, which release tiny bees when destroyed.
    • One of the Jungle bosses is the Queen Bee, which — like its Terraria counterpart — has a 3-stage dash attack, and also an attack that releases tiny bees at you.
    • You can encounter enemies in The Fortress of Death that look and attack exactly like the Enchanted Sword and Crimson Axe hardmode enemies in Terraria.
    • Several of the Tavern patrons are modelled on the Terraria NPCs. The two regulars — the bartender and the nurse — resemble the Tavernkeep and Nurse NPCs, and have similar purposes. Of the irregular patrons, you can encounter a miner who looks a lot like the Demolitionist and sells you bombs, and a wizard who resembles the Wizard NPC. Finally, there's an irregular Tavern patron who will offer to sell you Illegal Gun Parts, the same as Terraria's Arms Dealer does.
    • The "Party Enchanted" random event spawns confetti cannons into the room, which resemble the confetti items sold by the Party Girl NPC.
    • One of the unlockable Gifts is the Broken Hero Sword, a hardmode crafting ingredient from Terraria.
  • References to other roguelikes include:
    • The general Bullet Hell and dodging gameplay within locked rooms is similar to Enter the Gungeon.
    • Gun-type weapons work similarly to those from Enter the Gungeon, requiring a short delay to reload after they have depleted their magazines, and also allowing manual reloading.
    • The Lead Maiden from Enter the Gungeon sometimes makes an appearance.
    • The Sawblade Boomerang resembles and behaves similarly to the Sawmerang from Risk of Rain.
    • The Boneyard has skeleton archers, like Minecraft.
    • The Blazes from Minecraft also make an appearance in The Volcano.
  • Another favored source to shout out is Path of Exile:
    • The Mageblood trait keeps potion effects permanently active, in reference to the item of the same name.
    • Similarily, the Quecholli heavily resembles its namesake in looks and gameplay quirks.
    • One of the attacks of the final boss of the Blazing Hell route, where it spawns rows of fireballs with gaps from all sides, is all but taken straight from the Searing Exarch fight.
  • There are many references to Dark Souls:
    • The bonfire with a sword stuck into it.
    • Souls as a currency.
    • Bell gargoyles appear as a boss; mechanically, they're more similar to Demon in Pain and Demon from Below. Gargoyle Tail Axe is an available weapon.
    • One of the new Floor 8 bosses introduced with the Between Heaven and Hell update is just straight up Ornstein and Smough.
  • Other shout-outs:
    • All of the achievements are song titles.
    • The Red Dragon's boastful opening dialogue is borrowed from Smaug.
    • One of the legendary weapons is the V.B.F.G, presumably a version of Doom's BFG.
    • The Big Chomper is a wieldable Chain Chomp that acts like an Epic Flail.
    • The Triple Machinegun from Nuclear Throne makes an appearance.
    • The Tyler's Robe is a shout out to Olexa, a gaming YouTuber who focuses on roguelikes. Olexa's real name is Tyler, and the robe is the same design as the one worn by his YouTube avatar.
• Situational Sword: The Giantslayer, an enormous broadsword that does extra damage against bosses.
• Spread Shot: One of many shot patterns used by player weapons, most obviously the various Multishot bows and crossbows. Some enemies have spread attacks too.
• Stock Femur Bone: Bones feature as projectile weapons and also as obstacles in one of the Random Events. All of them are the classic femur bone shape.
• Sword Beam: Some swords produce crescents of energy.
• Training Dummy: One of the Event rewards provides a dummy for you to try out your attacks on.
• Turns Red: All bosses have two Life Meters that must be depleted in succession, one white followed by one red. Once you deplete the first one, the boss turns angry and upgrades its attacks to more dangerous versions.
• Use Your Head: The Horn Helmet gives your dash a powerful headbutt attack.
• Video Game Dashing: A central mechanic, the dash allows you to dodge attacks and rapidly adjust your position. Its use is limited by your character's stamina, but there are plenty of ways to increase that, and many abilities are tied to the dash in some way.
• Weaponized Headgear: The Horn Helmet, which can be used to strike enemies during a dash.
• Wishing Well: One of the random events. You can throw gold into the well for a chance of a luck boost.
• You No Take Candle: Kobolds speak this way, with simplified grammar.