Designing EverCrawl : The Concept

Some Background

For the longest time I have been working on another game called The Wishgranter. It's a pixelart top-down action roguelike focusing on deep  satisfying combat and intelligent dungeon generation mechanics. As great as that might sound, it is also incredibly over ambitious for a single developer so after 7+ years of working on it in my free time I got burnt out. Badly. I couldn't bear the idea of cancelling a project I have been working on for so long and I still love the game to death but it got to a point where I hated working on it and hated not working on it. The solution was to put it on hold and take some time to explore other ideas. 

Risky Chest

Coming up with the idea

So with the plan being to take a brief break from The Wishgranter, I wanted to come up with an idea for a game that I can finish inside a year but also have it be fun and engaging. I also wanted it to be accessible by as many people as possible and not have to worry about selling the game or having to market it. I wanted to make a project just for the sake of having fun making it and being able to say that I finished something and put it out there.

I settled on the idea of developing the game mobile first, that way I could have the game be free with a bit of ads, and have the game be accessible to pretty much anyone who owns and android or iphone. Also mobile first games are usually simpler and have a more focused design which would help limit my ambition. I am a huge fan of roguelikes so there was no doubt it was in some way going to be a roguelike. For some reason I immediately landed on the idea of always moving up a narrow vertical dungeon so I immediately ran with it and started putting together a mock-up.

Design from Limitations

So having to design for mobile is already a pretty big limitation but to add further to that I decided to also go for a 4-color palette in order to be able to do a palette switching mechanic. I also wanted to limit animations so that I wouldn't need to spend days working on drawing a single enemy and instead I could very quickly sketch something up and have it in-game. Most of the animation would instead be done through code.

Mockup Process and Motion Mockup

Above you can see 2 mockups. On the left are steps of the mockup process and on the right is a quick animation I did to wrap my head around how it would look in motion. I quickly liked the idea and friends and family seemed to dig it so I didn't bother exploring other prototypes and jumped right into working towards a working build.

Problem Solving

A working build quickly came together. I decided on using Monogame because I had 7+ years experience working on XNA already and a ton of code I could re-use so it was a breeze to put a prototype together. Anyone out there who makes games can relate to how good it feels to actually having a prototype running for the first time. I found the fun in game development again and I was really positive about the project.

As I was playing around with it however I immediately started to notice how the simple and straightforward design was actually a very tricky design challenge. 

• How do you make enemies feel different in such a simple game? 
• How do you make the different levels feel unique? 
• How do you introduce and manage difficulty? 
• Can you have multiple Player classes that feel different enough?  
• Can you have a shop or other interesting stuff inside these dungeons?

The entire development lifetime of EverCrawl ended up being mostly about answering these questions. I like to think I managed to pull off something that works within these limitations but we'll see once the game is out!

Going forward I will be posting a small series of posts about designing the different aspects of EverCrawl starting with the Enemies.

That's all for now. Thanks for reading!