Today I'm gonna be talking about arcade games, roguelikes, and the recent trend towards forgiveness in games.
Video games in the past were harder to come by than they are nowadays. The average person didn't own multiple consoles, let alone even one, so games were restricted to places like arcades. Since these were essentially shared consoles, games were designed to be very unforgiving- oftentimes, you would have 3 or so lives, and upon losing all of them, you would lose all progress in the game. When home consoles started becoming more popular, this started to change, but it wasn't immediate. The original Super Mario Bros. still worked this way- you had a number of lives, and if you lost them all, you lost all progress in the game (though I've heard there are ways to start at the beginning of the world instead). Aside from the warp zone, the only way to get through the game was by not dying more than a few times.
Eventually, this did change- by the time Super Mario World came out, losing all of your lives would send you back to a save point, which you would get every few levels (this probably isn't the first example of this of course). This continued to the point where having lives in games is largely meaningless- a lot of games just omit them completely.
There is a genre of games that refuses to be this forgiving, however- namely, roguelikes (more accurately, roguelike-likes; roguelike technically refers specifically to procedurally generated dungeon crawlers, but the term is now used for basically any vaguely similar game with perma-death). Roguelikes don't give the player save points, or allow you to die without being punished for it. If there is saving, it's only to allow the player to take a break- once you die, the save game is gone.
There's a newer type of game, though, which takes roguelike elements but puts them in a more forgiving system, as paradoxical as it sounds. Games like The Binding of Isaac, Spelunky, Rogue Legacy and Dungreed- when you die, you lose all of your progress, but doing well can allow you to unlock things for future runs. It can be anything from items in Isaac to stats in Rogue Legacy, or simply shortcuts, as in Spelunky.
I talked before about a game I was thinking of making- an exploration/survival game, in a fictional procedurally generated tropical island chain. I've been thinking about it, and I'm considering an overhaul of how it works- essentially, changing it from a classic roguelike with permadeath to a more modern, arcade roguelike. Rather than seeing how long you could live, the goal would be to gather as much loot as you could- be it from ancient temples, from trading, or from kidnapping people to bring back as slaves- and take it all home, ideally without dying. Money you bring back would be used for upgrading things like your ship, or your equipment. If you don't make it back alive, though, you wouldn't get to spend the money, so the player would have to find a balance between getting enough and not pushing their luck.
The main reason for this change was that I basically asked myself which game I'd rather play. I'm not a fan of hyperrealistic survival games, and if I make any progress in roguelikes, I tend to get too paranoid to keep playing. On the other hand, I love games like The Binding of Isaac, where you can sit down for a while, play through a life, then either die or beat whatever bosses and win. Either way, the game ends, and it's not immersive enough that I'm overly afraid of losing. I don't think I'd want lives to be that short in my game (in Isaac, they tend to last 30-45 minutes for me)- I'd want the player to have time to learn the layout of the islands, learn what plants are safe, and get to know a handful of tribes, before they either leave or die. I realise that's pushing it a bit with the whole not getting attached to the game thing, but I'd have to say that outweighs the arcade aspects. If you can only explore for half an hour, there might not be enough time for any real exploration.
Anyways, that's gonna be it for today- hopefully you enjoyed this post!
