Regarding Difficulty

Our difficulty selection tries to be as honest as possible about the experiences provided.

I’ll be totally honest, here. I’m bad at videogames. I’m especially bad at roguelikes. You’d think that programming these monsters, looking over their stats day in, day out, would give me a solid leg up in how to get past them. But the sad, embarrassing truth is: I’ve never scored an honest victory in 100 Rogues, even on Easy Mode. Now that I’ve completely dashed all credibility I have on the subject, I want to reassure you: I’m the programmer. I assume Keith Burgun, the game’s designer, can beat the game handily, even on Normal difficulty.

But why can’t I clear a run? Why do I always die somewhere around the Dungeon? There’s a few reasons.

Part of it, at least in the current iteration of the game, is Map layout. When transitioning from the iOS version to the Ouya version, one of the key redesign goals was to open up the maps to reduce the prevalence of bottle-necking strategies in ideal play, and to speed up gameplay. I may have overshot, and started producing maps that make finding cover almost impossible. This is especially fatal in the Dungeon world, where Skeleton Archers deal massive damage, usually guarded by too many Skeletons.

Our inspiration for map design. Note that moving from one tile to the next in Rogue takes .05 seconds, and in 100 Rogues it takes .4, because of animations. This was unacceptably slow

There’s another, far more important reason I lose so often, though: I’m just careless and lazy. I know how dangerous it is to get into Melee range against a Knight; each hit has a fair chance at stun-locking you until whatever is in the area sops up your remaining health like bread over runny egg yolk. But I still do it a lot! Why is that?

The reason is, I play in a way that feels more natural to me. Throwing a grenade might be the right choice for the predicament I’m in, but if I have to go into a menu, change a tab, click an item, click a button, and then select a target, I’m just going to run in and smack a thing.

So UX counts for a lot. The game’s design philosophy started out with the intention to emphasize player skills, but the key ingredient to survival really is about proper item and equipment management. While Ranged play is the steak and potatoes of the Wizard’s and Scoundrel’s kit, you need to be throwing items constantly no matter what class you are.

So it’s been critical to find ways to improve the UX to make it as effortless as possible to throw items. On iOS, we added quick slots along the bottom of the UI, creating priority items that can be used at any time. On PC, we have the real estate to put your entire inventory is in Quick Slots. I went one step further, though, and added a new Equipment Slot specifically for thrown items.

Check it out! New slot!

Now when you get a big stack of items that are optimal for throwing, like arrows or rocks or throwing knives, they can be assigned to this item slot. From there, a keybinding allows you to throw the items stacked in this slot as easily as targeting any other skill in the game.

So that’s an example of how I’m trying to make sure the User Interface aligns with the optimal ways to play the game. The winning strategy should not require a huge number of interactions to implement.

This isn’t the only approach to managing the game’s difficulty, although it is just about the only one I can make without fundamentally changing the game’s design. Keith designed 100% of all balance considerations for Normal difficulty, as far as player and enemy stats, loot tables and drop rates, and boss behaviour. And it is very, very difficult; even when following the optimal strategies, a single mistake or a bit of bad luck with enemy placement can end an otherwise fantastic run in an instant.

Since a key design goal for the game was accessibility, Easy mode was implemented as a compromise. The biggest changes in this area are the player starting stats and stat regenerations values, but certain other balance considerations were made. One of the most notable is the second boss fight, which only has half the functional enemy spawners on Easy Mode.

It is still my opinion that Easy Mode is far too punishing for players that want to understand what we’re going for in terms of strategy and skill progression, but don’t need to spend hundreds of hours internalizing enemy stats, damage types, spawning probabilities, loot table statistics, etc..