Devlog #1: Where We Are Going

For a note on the future of this game please see here.

Hello All!  I'm Hueson the designer and programmer of Not Actually A DOS Game a upcoming retro inspired roguelike.  For the first devlog I want introduce the game and my general thinking about it.  For future logs I'd like to take the format of where the game is currently, in regards to the relevant devlog subject, and then talk about where it is headed.  This should hopefully give a good sense of where the game is currently in development and how it should progress.

To start off, the plan for this game is to take the look of DOS/C64 games like Rogue, Moria and Gauntlet and treat them with the same design mindset as any other game made today.  While I personally find those games enjoyable, it is hard to get friends excited about them because they are so archaic.  If you've ever looked at pictures of ASCII Dwarf Fortress that is a shade of the experience, albeit a bit more acute, described when modern players try and play the more ancient classics.

I think the problem is two-fold, graphics and what I'll broadly call the 'interface.'

Graphics, to a degree, is an easy one.  As far as the actual game is concerned it comes secondary to what and how the game is interacted with.  If you've ever played FFXIV or WoW you'll know how one ends up looking at the mini-map for the majority of traversal.  The nice looking castles and wide landscapes, while necessary, are ultimately secondary.  The hard information, your global position, HP, cast progress, and the like, are vastly more important.  As any player of those games know, that information is represented in fairly simplistic, non-flashy art that get the info to you as fast and with as little hassle as possible.  Beyond that, WoW has continued to be successful regardless of some of its assets still being their original 2004 selves.  This is a testament to the quality of the material that makes up the game, not the way it looks.

While it is possible to overlook the graphics of Rogue and Moria it is far more difficult to get pass how much trouble it is to actually play the game itself.  It can be borderline painful.  You constantly have to look up what keys do what - if you even knew there was a help screen in the first place.  Knowing what commands you have is another problem entirely but  that assumes you figured out what they do.  The constant impediments to engaging with the game itself making it brutally hard to play.

Rogue/Moria being hard to brings up an interesting point however.  Games like Dark Souls or StarCraft 2 are difficult as well but in a vastly different way.  The distinction is critical.  In those games the challenge comes from being successful at the game's content, not from the difficulty of working the game itself.  To be sure, it is no hard thing to move the hero in Dark Souls or select units in SC2.  The hard part of those games is winning.  This is the rightful place for challenge to be centralized.

Consider the difference in the experience of playing StarCraft: BroodWar and StarCraft 2.  BroodWar, which came out in 1998, allows you to select twelve units at once.  It is possible to have more than a hundred units to control in a single game.  This presents a challenge in getting done what you want.  Then there is SC2, BroodWar's 2010 sequel, where you can select as many units as you want and even focus on individual groups within that selection with relative ease.  In SC2 it is simply easier to do what you want while much of the strategic challenge remains.

The modern player should have no business putting up with difficulties in interacting with the game itself.  It is good and well to have a Souls-like where the game is hard to be successful at but there is little reason to have a game that is difficult to engage with.  This is the problem I hope to fix with Not Actually A DOS Game.  It can be your usual Roguelike challenge, where you loose a whole lot, but should be should be as straightforward as possible to play.  The goal is to shave off as much of the archaic nonsense that keeps people from enjoying Rogue/Moria as possible while preserving the flavor and look of that era.

That and it saves me a whole lot of time on art.

Philosophy out of the way let's turn to the plan for this game.  Initially the thought was to make a one off micro-game in the vein of the very cool Numgeon but it was easy to expand past that.  If the game can be gotten to a state where it is playable for five to ten hours or be worth a one time five to ten dollar purchase I'd be quite happy.  Looking past release I have other projects I'm committed to so support for this is entirely connected to what people want from the game.  I enjoy working on it so if people enjoy playing it updates will follow.