Darren with Josh Ge (aka Kyzrati) about Designing for Mastery and the latest in Cogmind development.
You can download the mp3 of the podcast, play it in the embedded player below, or you can follow us on iTunes.
Synopsis & Useful Links
- Catching up on the last 10 years of Cogmind development, and its 8 years of Early Access on Steam
- Long-term development attracting "master" players and the need to develop with them in mind
- "True wins" and alternative, harder victory conditions for master players - lumenstones in Brogue, crowning in ADOM, runes of Zot in DCSS, etc
- Managing the power curve across a game for master players, ensuring there is variety of challenge, and avoiding "ascension kit" gameplay whilst still ensuring some fixed elements players can strategise around
- Personal achievement and mastery as the antithesis of metaprogression mechanics
- The crazy amount of data Josh keeps on his players
- Balancing community feedback, and not just listening to the loudest voices
- The legend of master roguelike player Gamblers Justice (GJ), who has streaked many hard roguelikes and inspired harder modes
- Challenge/conduct modes and player-created challenges
- Achievements, high scores and other incentives for mastery players, and how to design them appropriately
- Roguelikes as single-player mastery games, which the genre has a unique spin on
- Permadeath setting the expectation for mastery
- The satisfaction that comes with successful mastery, and the tension and joy that comes with overcoming truly challenging situations
- How to support players in understanding they've entered a "mastery moment", and giving them options to respond
- Optional early difficulty, and how it can backfire
- Check out Josh's blog post on this topic!
I do not like how the synopsis says that single-player mastery is a distinctive and unique feature of the genre, it comes out as somewhat elitist to me (although what you actually say in the episode is not that elitist).
ReplyDeleteSingle-player mastery appears, to some extent, in: solitaires (which I interpret as games similar to multi-player tabletop games but designed for single player -- as a consequence, a "good" solitaire demands mastery, just like a good multi-player game does), arcade games (lots of stories about great Tetris or Pacman players), strategy games (turn-based tactics, 4X, etc.), soulslike/metroidvania games (hard bosses that require lots of tries to overcome, etc.), and many other kinds of games as optional challenges.
I think the reason why the focus on mastery/permadeath became so visible in the roguelike community is the fact that roguelikes are traditionally free games, they have no actual marketing, and thus they are "marketed" by hardcore players who tend to think about games that way. For a comparison, Diablo was intended to be a permadeath game but the devs did not enforce this -- which was IMO a correct choice, because it made the game a mainstream hit, without really making the game worse for permadeath players who could still play permadeath. (Although they should highlight the mastery mode more, which they did not do in D1.) I think we should do more to emphasize that while roguelikes are great mastery games, they can also be enjoyed more casually -- for example, if one is afraid of roguelikes because of permadeath, they should know that this fear is not substantiated because playing without permadeath is usually possible (and many people still prefer to play with permadeath because of how great the game is).
I think that, ultimately, people do not want games to master, but they love a specific kind of gameplay so much that they want to master it. The fact that in a roguelike you control the flow of time (more than in other turn-based games) is what is actually almost unique to roguelikes, and also what makes casual players play them, and mastery-focused players pick them instead of other decision-making games.
I would also say that the original purpose of permadeath in roguelikes is not really mastery, but immersive role-playing; as far as I understand, this is what Rogue devs intended, and systemic mastery is more of a innovation of Dungeon Crawl. (NetHack and ADOM rely also on non-systemic secrets while Angband allows grinding.) I do not like how some games call permadeath modes "roguelike" and non-permadeath modes "roleplay" -- AFAIK many hardcore RPG players in general prefer to at least partially observe permanent consequence for immersion (especially if they are meant to provide an experience similar to tabletop RPGs which usually do observe permadeath).
Pretty sure the main reason for permadeath in Rogue was to prevent abuse. Ie, for those who have played Castle of the Wind, preventing the player from just:
Delete-Finding a new item
-Saving the game
-Equipping or using said item
-Loading their save if they got a bad result
It is worth noting that one of the developers of Rogue saw games like puzzles, so role play wasn't exactly the sole purpose being aimed for either.
I'm fairly sure there was no saving just because there was no memory storage, and even if there was it would have meant shared saves across the server. Saving is a luxury we have become used to, but it didn't used to be the default.
Delete@Zeno I've updated the synopsis - bad wording on my part.
DeleteAs for making roguelikes more approachable and not just giving off this mastery vibe, I think Qud has done a tremendous job of that and has lots of lessons one can learn from.
Someone seems a bit salty regarding achievements! I fully agree that Tales of Maj'Eyal probably goes a little far, but at the same time I sort of like the idea too. Playing a recent game called Inkbound, I was able to get a bunch of achievements by just playing the game on its easiest difficulty. It really felt unearned and a bit like work to do that, but it was clearly the fastest way to get those achievements out of the way.
ReplyDeleteAt the same time though, I don't think I'm ever going to be playing Tales of Maj'Eyal on Madness difficulty. As a result I'll likely never get those associated achievements, but I might pick up a win on Insane at some point and be happy about it.