In my previous post I talked about the building blocks of the action roguelike I am building and today I wanted to focus a bit more on the things that drives the technical decisions – the Core Pillars for my game. I think the best way to convey my motivation is to highlight the foundation that my game sits on and explain each point.

Lets start with the pillars:

Pillar 1: Making the game I want to play

I love playing action roguelikes/lites and all of their iterations and also all adjacant genres too, like Dark Souls, Elden Ring, Bloodborne, Sekiro and so on.

I also love games like Dead Cells, Celeste and Hollow Knight.
When I sat down to think about what is important for me, I decided to step back and carefully analyse what I like most from these games and the answer for me is that I like the feeling of large weapons staggering and obliterating enemies and I also like a bit of platforming. My absolute favourite thing to do is to load up various different saves from Dark Souls 3 and Elden Ring, where I have great weapons and go and smash some enemies. The feeling of swinging something mega heavy, meeting an enemy, and breaking their posture and stunning them, opening them for a further devastating attack is probably what I like most.

I get the same feel in other games when enemies are stunned, like in Hollow Knight when we stun a boss and in Dead Cells where the first hit is stun, it just makes me to go all out and do maximum DPS.

After that realisation, after figuring out what is the line for me connecting all of these games (bar Celeste, but I like the platforming there although I suck at it) for me, that became my number one pillar – make the game I want to play because I am motivated by a feel that I have experienced and like.

Here are three examples of the different wapons players would be able to use:

There is a lot more I can say about this but lets move on to the second pillar.

Pillar 2: Movement and Control

Having played a lot of games, I think I can distinguish good controls from bad controls and I can tell the difference, as well as pretty much every person who has played more than one game, what good control is.

Major focus for my action roguelike game is to have a smooth and responsive control of the character, with multistage jump and variable height. The feel that the character can be controlled by light touches and be quick and snappy to respond, is major centerpiece when it comes to technical implementation.

My game will not feature precision platforming akin to Celeste but there are a lot of quality of life additions such as Coyote Time and ledge snap (the ledge snap means that if you jump between platforms and for some reason you are about to miss by 2-3px, the character will be automatically repositioned to land on the platform, that is the basics of it) simply because precision platforming is not the focus, combat is.

Pillar 3: Combat

I love action-based games. I have played action-based games since I was 7 years old, when I played Mortal Combat for the first time and was immediately taken by it.

This is actually the easiest and yet the hardest part to work on. The good news is that I know exactly what combat I like, the “challenging” news is how do I make it work in the way that I like – heavy, strong, satisfying.

The decision I made is to make the combat evolve around great weapons such as hammers, axes and swords, further assisted via a ranged weapon – a blunderbuss. This not only locks in perfectly the aesthetic of my main character (being a swashbuckling dwarf, where these weapons make sense for them) but also makes sense from a worldbuilding point of view. It is pretty well understood that dwarves wield such weapons and I am just making them “slightly” larger, so from that perspective, the player should have an easy time figuring out the identity of the main character and the game as a whole.

Without spoiling any further, these weapons will be swappable and will have different stats and “traits” (still a placeholder word for what I am after but will do for now) that give certain abilities, specific only for this type of weapon.

Lets move to the final pillar and save the good combat spoils for another time.

Pillar 4: Atmosphere

I love history. I watch all of the major history channels on YouTube and I am fascinated by each period. But my most favourite period is from the 16th to early 19th Century Central Europe, evolving around stone, timber, iron, fire and gun powder and some elements of the Industrial Revolution. Also the naval element of that period is my favourite, especially Horatio Nelson and Thomas Cochrane, which is the real life inspiration for Captain Jack Aubrey, from the movie Master and Commander.

I cannot encapsulate all of that, it is too much, too rich and I will probably end up doing a bad job since I am not an artist, but having this period in time as a North Star, is enough to build my world around it and again, fits my main character very well, at least thats how I feel, further playtests and feedback will tell me if my assumptions are correct.

Closing Thoughts

I read these pillars every day. It is very easy to get distracted and end up on the wrong path. I did that without realising, and ended up building something useful yes, but not really needed now, it could have been a post-launch update or something like that.

You could say that I wasted the time now given what else needs doing but no point thinking about it at this point, cannot be undone so I will embrace it and try to do better.

The major idea I want to highlight with this post is that my game sits on core pillars that are directly tied to the things that inspire me and the things that I like, and it is not driven by marketing trends or other data, which is probably not a bad way to build games but that is just not who I am.

If you are making a game or generally interested about how games are made, you can more or less see how the idea for this game came to be, what shaped it and where it is heading.

Massive thank you to the people who have subscribed to my newsletter!

Thank you. It means a lot to me. I am thinking about giving something back to the people who have subscribed to my newsletter so stay tuned and in due course, I will announce it!