Concept

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 inhabit a series of procedurally generated game worlds, each with their own end boss, that when defeated, will trigger the generation of the next game world.

The player's character is erased on death, but they can still spawn again as a new character on the same game world, giving them a new opportunity to try again, either with minor adjustments to their 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.

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

• Drop in and play, 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.

Minecraft

• Primitive base building, intense early-game, freedom to explore an unknown world.

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 RPG 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.

Design pillars

Consider the following "design pillars" to be the foundational aspects of the game vision, that can be thought of as lenses through which to scrutinise any ideas for the game.

Provides a framework around which ideas can be fit into the game in a more harmonious and purposeful way, rather than just adding an idea "because it seems cool", even if it doesn't address a particular issue or enhance an existing feature.

Mechanics should be designed such that they support one or more of these pillars.

Rebirth

Expanding the roguelike concept to the game world itself. A procedurally generated world, where each generation has a clearly defined end-goal, and different set of challenges. Players aim to complete each world generation to trigger a new generation, as a form of personal progression.

Each world generation should feel like it's own campaign in an RPG.

Pillars:

• Clear goal:
• Replayability:
• Embracing change:

Mechanics:

• Procedural generation: Use of Wave Function Collapse with a varying set of modules to allow for specific biome themed map generations, that focus on particular environmental challenges and enemies.

The Tribe

Address the lack of games in the multiplayer browser gaming space with a focus on meaningful co-op play. Almost everything seems to be arcade style PvP focused, with only minor or superficial teamwork elements.

Pillars:

• Reciprocity:
  • Prompt players to communicate and propose cooperation between each other. "What do you need?"
  • Prompt appreciation between players and remembrance of kind acts. "Thanks!", "I found these gems while I was exploring if you want them"
  • Drive recognition of the player among the group. "Timmy expanded the farm area", "Janie is best at making magic gear".
• Specialisation: Sacrifice independence for power. Division of labour; Gain efficiency in something, but lack something else, become more dependent on other players, but also offer something new to the group.
• Dependency: You depend on other players, so don't piss them off. Other players depend on you too, so they better not piss you off either.
• Purpose: Your purpose in the game world, and to other players. "We need you to upgrade our swords", "Can someone enchant this for me pls?"

Mechanics:

• Jobs
• Classes: The combat archetype (Warrior, Mage, Archer, etc.) of each player, allowing them a degree of personal expression and roleplaying. The main way items are consumed. Item type perks for each class, so players will want to use whatever is most efficient to use for their class.

The Great Unknown

Lean into how the most chaotic, stressful, and exciting part of many survival/crafting games (Minecraft, ARK, Rust) is often the very early-game experience right at the start, capturing that feeling of being thrown into a hostile environment and having to quickly cobble together some basic survival infrastructure from whatever resources are available, while there is still a genuine threat posed to the player from the game world.

Often in these kinds of survival games, when the player reaches the point that they have firmly established themselves and set up a reliable and consistent income of resources, such as having built a large, well equipped and easily defended base, have a stockpile of rare resources saved up, and a farm to quickly, easily and safely generate any resource they may need more of, and have reached the end tier gear, then the threat of the game largely subsides and those games often enter a boring limbo state when there are no further challenges of meaningful threat to the player, and any loses to the player from any remaining threats can be recovered from relatively easily using the player's existing infrastructure. i.e. they can rebuild very easily, so losing items through character death loses impact.

The regeneration of the game world (which includes wiping all built structures) when the objective is accomplished, is a means of putting players in that more exciting early-game state more frequently, and discouraging players from optimising the fun out of the game.

Roleplaying with emphasis on frequent iterations of class archetypes/builds, especially ones that a player might not otherwise have considered trying, due the tendency for players to default to what they are used to from other games of a genre.

Get players to explore more perspectives of their team than what they might used to, and be better able to empathise with the benefits and constraints of players in other roles, and develop a more holistic understanding of what good teamwork looks like within the context of the game.

Pillars:

• Adaptation:
  • Give players a blank canvas to establish a relatively simple base on (every world generation starts off with no structures)
  • What they build should be influenced by a set of constraints to work around (terrain, available resources, environmental threats).
• Make do / Exploration
  • Make players have to do what they can with a given starting state, and make decisions based on incomplete information, as every world generation (and the specific challenges therein) is different, so a reliable meta strategy cannot be easily established/the game cannot be "solved".
  • Every map generation is unique, so nobody knows where the optimal places to build are, what the layout of the map is like, what environmental challenges they will have to deal with, and where certain valuable resources are.
  • Encourage players to explore the unknown world and gather more information to make better decisions based on.
• Impermanence
  • Less emphasis on being a long-term persistent town-building sim, due to the impermanence of the world instance itself.
  • Bases should feel organic and ramshackle, built to fit the players' immediate needs, instead of being carefully planned and optimised to maximise efficiency.