Get Good: How to Write a Roguelike Without Losing Your Mind
Or: Articy Draft 3 My Beloved
Roguelikes have been highly en-vogue in the 2020s: their procedurally-generated looping structure is a fantastic mechanism for storytelling, but can also pose a real challenge when it comes to designing and implementing a narrative. And when your team hasn’t made a roguelike before? It’s a real “build the plane as you’re flying it” kind of experience. Thankfully, our maiden voyage was a success, but like making any game — it required some real problem solving along the way. Here’s just a taste of what those challenges looked like, and the tools and strategies we used to get good.
There are a few traditional narrative MOs that video games tend to follow. You might be the most familiar with the “3 act” structure with its inciting incident, rising action, and falling action. But when the gameplay loop is, well, looping, it can make progression throughout an overarching story complex to design. Toss in a procedurally generated world where you still expect characters to turn up, and you can run into some real progression blockers. So like many roguelikes, we have a central “hub” space of The Lookout that the player can return to. This cozy spot is where they can edit their loadout, do some target practice, and speak with any recruited/befriended characters in a space where they can reliably turn up. This guarantees that the player can have conversations with NPCs which advance the story, rather than endlessly searching for them in a Run. Additionally, we have several in-Run rooms or locations that can pop up within designated biomes: such as a specific campsite or roaming market, so the player can always know where to find friendly (or not so friendly) faces in an ever-changing world.
The big trick to organizing how looping stories progress lies in variables and their conditions. For this, our team relied on the combined powers of Unreal Engine 5 and Articy Draft 3. Unreal is our game engine of course, but Articy is our dialogue editor where we write and organize the various conversations. It also keeps track of the variables and conditions that tell Unreal what conversations are available to play or have already been heard. Articy’s ability to juggle multiple variable sets at once was invaluable to our implementation, and our engineers and tech designers built us a tool that parses all of these into Unreal. This is how we’re able to make sure that the player can progress through the story in the proper order of the beats, regardless of how their last Run went.
But outside of dialogue with characters, we also have variables that are “listening” to the world of the Foglands around them. These sorts of variables keep track of what might have killed the player on their last Run, who the player may recently have spoken to, or which collectible keys have been picked up. When these variables are “called” in Unreal, it may allow the Stranger to say something sassy about your last cause of death, or for Shandeen to tell an anecdote about a Runner of the past. We wanted the world to feel reactive in this way, and to give the idea that something is always watching.
However, one of the greater challenges when working with variables in a looping structure is pacing: that is, having various plot moments feel like they are occurring at the “right” time, and making sure there aren’t any prolonged periods where nothing (or too much) happens. We tried to map out pacing through a variety of techniques, using everything from spreadsheets to flowcharts, but ultimately good ol’ fashioned trial and error helped us create a progression that felt right… and it turns out the narrative of our game was longer than we expected!
There’s lots to dive into even with our small ensemble cast, and we can’t wait for you all to experience it. You can preorder The Foglands on the PlayStation Store,or on the platform of your choice!
