Gamesmithing: Thoughts on Making a Nonviolent Roguelike
The world tree Yggdrasil towers over Moondrop Mountain
It's fair to say that many roguelikes are designed around combat. Classics like Rogue, Nethack, Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, and Moria all play off of the traditional "dungeon crawl". The player plays as a fighter, a wizard, or a thief, or many other professions whose mechanics are centered around violence. (N.B.: Mundane classes like as baker, janitor, or cab driver are usually not options.) Many modern descendants of the classic roguelikes keep that same focus on combat.
Combat is the source of many 'verbs' in these games - "attack", "cast fireball", "backstab", etc. Combat is the means through which players and their @ characters are judged. Do they have a good build? Did the player make the right choices during the course of the game? If their character succeeds at combat, the answer is "yes". If the character dies (as they so often do), the player learns something for the next run. Even games that allow a pacifist playthrough rarely promote a pacifist viewpoint. The pacifist run is taken as a challenge *because* it is so difficult to avoid combat in the game. Compare the statements "I just did a pacifist run through Cogmind" and "I just did a pacifist run of making a sandwich". Sandwich-making is generally a peaceful art, so no one brags "I made a sandwich without killing anyone." Combat is a lens, a way to view a dungeon, and a means to interact with the game.
There's absoultely nothing wrong with combat in roguelikes. But I wanted my own "pacifist challenge". Of the many things I love about roguelikes, I didn't think many of them *require* combat. I wanted to see if I could translate those things outside of a combat framework and reproduce them in a nonviolent game. I recently released a nonviolent farming roguelike, Moondrop, and I'll go over one success and two challenges in making the game nonviolent.
My biggest success with Moondrop was in reproducing the *thrill of discovery* of my favorite roguelikes. Moondrop is a game of systems that interact with each other. Players will probe at the boundaries of the systems (accidentally or on purpose), and it feels fantastic to have that curiosity acknowledged and rewarded. For example, the crops in the game have an elemental system - think fire, water, air, and earth. Crop growth is based entirely off of this element system. There's also an alchemy system, and one use of alchemy is to create potions that shift a crop's element. These potions are applied in a 3x3 grid, covering up to 9 tiles. Sometimes, that grid can include rocks (typical 'farmyard junk' that must be cleared away in farm games). If that happens, the player discovers that the rocks transform into elemental rocks that impact neighboring crop growth. This type of layering different systems and thinking up interesting ways they could interact with each other - nothing there requires an ax and a goblin corpse.
The biggest challenge, on the other hand, was dealing with permadeath. When you can't die in combat, permadeath has to take on a different form. In the first prototypes, I just had the game end. The player had to start from scratch after two weeks of farming. It didn't feel satisfying, though. It got better after a friend mentioned he couldn't imagine combining the roguelike and farm sim genres. To him, roguelikes were high-stakes and high-tension affairs where messing up meant starting over with nothing. Farm games were chill zen-like engine builders about doing daily chores. Or, more succinctly, farm games are about building things up and roguelikes are about tearing them down. I realized that it wasn't the roguelike genre itself that was in opposition to the farm sim. It was the permadeath.
I eventually built that permadeath / failure state by using narrative as a glue to tie things together. Your farm no longer abruptly ends. Instead, you are farming on a shapeshifting mountain where magic mists descends and rearranges everything it touches. You can hold back the mist for 10 days, and you can extend that by being good at farming and exploring. The mist became a sort of 'enemy' that you were trying to triumph over. Now, the player can fail and (nonviolently) be sent back to the start, and skilled players are able to resist the mist based on their understanding of the games systems.
Combat also gives a game tension and drama. It helps pace the game, helps players measure out their mastery of its systems, and provides for novel situations. A good game designer can try to maximize tension with their systems, seeking to challenge the player and push the player to their limits. Think of a boss fight where you barely scraped by, a trap that you escaped in the nick of time, or effin' Sigmund. A series of increasingly-dangerous combats punctured by moments of rest and respite (and loot) in between gives game a powerful rhythm. Without combat, I'd have to find another way to pace the game.
My solution here was to zag instead of zigging. Instead of trying to maximize tension, I tried to *maximize joy* - something more fitting for a chill and combatless farm game. I made exploration fun and full of interesting things to find around the corner. Two examples here. In the game, there are two distinct phases: a few days of farming, then (if you have enough money) an exploration phase through a proc gen mountain trail that plays much like a dungeon level. In the exploration phase, you need to solve tiny proc gen puzzles in order to reach the next level. Sometimes, my puzzle generation algorithms spit out a trivial puzzle. For instance, I have a "wheat maze" where the player cannot see themselves or the 'walls' of the maze. Sometimes, the generated solution is to walk straight from one end to the other - no walls are generated in between. During playtesting, I found that players loved this. They felt like they got one over on what is usually a difficult puzzle. Example number two: on the farm, you can explore and uncover preprogrammed "cache" objects underneath the mist. One type of cache is the bombfield, which has a large number of bomb rocks clustered together. Setting off one bomb rock sets off a chain reaction that clears a large part of the screen. This creates a large resource drop as nearby trees and bushes go boom. Fireworks + loot = joy.
That's not to say there's no tension in the game - the mist is always encroaching and must be slowed down. The mist is a long-term kind of tension, though, and the short-term pacing is governed by the joy-maximizing idea.
