September 2025 Dev Update
ROC Game Fest
Good news! We got the game in front of some real people this weekend at ROC Fest, Rochester's statewide Game Development Festival. Nearly 100 players got their hands on the newly minted gamepad support for 100 Rogues, entering the Bandit Hole and learning the basics of combat. The crowd was as diverse as can be, with people brand new to games all the way to folks who consume Roguelike content like breathing.
First, it was so incredibly motivating to get to talk with so many gamers and see their reactions to playing the game. As ever, there has been high praise for the game's artwork, and couple of players scheduled their day about finding time to play longer.
This crop of completely new players gave a great opportunity to revisit our onboarding / tutorial experience, as well as opportunities to revise our UI, as well as an opportunity to talk about 100 Rogues' goals with its difficulty settings.
The Goal of 100 Rogues
100 Rogues original elevator pitch was, in part, "make a roguelike that modern audiences can understand." Thankfully, genre trappings like permadeath are so commonplace in indie games that a lot of our work has been done for us by popular gaming.
At the risk of starting Roguelike versus Roguelite debates, it is important to note that traditional roguelikes are unique in one expectation: the average player giving the average effort will likely never see the end credits. That's okay! That's truly not a judgment of our players' skill levels. Progress is a slow, steady process of reading situations and learning to intuit our RNG. If you know the exact chance of finding a Tower Shield, you be able to learn when it's worth taking the Heavy Armaments skill, for example.
Players approaching our game ought to have the expectation set that chasing a high score is The Point of playing.
You might die 100 times in the Dungeon before you get to the boss. If half of those were a Personal Best score, then you are playing correctly, and finally getting to the boss is proof of how much you've learned.
So, emphasizing the leaderboards and really rewarding the player for their achievement is our goal in correctly setting players expectations for the experience of playing 100 Rogues.
The Tutorial
But outside of those high level gameplay concepts, the Traditional Roguelike is still a hard sell for a lot of players. Pokemon Mystery Dungeon was a familiar point of entry for a few of our players, but for the most part players had a predeliction to approaching the game like a classic Zelda game (which isn't a coincidence, since those games were a clear inspiration for the game's perspective).
For the Ouya port, we had a separate tutorial level explaining the basics of combat, unlocking skills, loot, etc.. This was actually the least-effort approach for a lot of technical reasons I can't get into, but in general, this is not how players approach games anymore. One of the most in-depth Let's Plays of 100 Rogues' Ouya port shows the player jumping right into the game and fumbling for several minutes just to figure out how to make a basic melee attack! The tutorial was his next stop, but the average player will find this a frustrating and tedious extra step.
So, for Steam, we will be integrating the tutorials into gameplay, with the assumption that players will jump in assuming they can learn as they go. As a simple, easy first effort, these controls diagrams will be accessible from the main menu. While this is a good start, “Quick Throw Slot” doesn’t explain the relationship this button has with the Equipment Menu or the quality of life purpose it serves. Even “Target Attack” is oversimplified, as the button is superfluous for melee attacks and the explanation is insufficient to describe the differences between targeting behaviours of ranged and melee weapons.
So, to go one very important step further and solve those problems, we will be implementing contextual tutorial panels that force the player through critical interactions like making attacks, purchasing skills, or using the radial menu. These can be hard to get right, and can be very annoying if they are unwelcome or obtrusive, so it's important to be patient and careful in implementing them.
I posted last month about the game's difficulty, and this is the entire solution. "The game is not difficult, you just need to know how to play it!" is a frequent chorus in difficulty discourse in games. It is entirely true, and the game's developer has a clear, strong responsibility to ensure the process of learning how to play is fun, not frustrating or confusing.
The tutorial should give just enough guidance that the interface no longer stands in your way, without ever robbing the experience of building up knowledge and strategies. We need to give players a gentle push and a clear heading into the game, and with it, the confidence to play and learn on their own.
Future Development
The Expo this weekend was an opportunity for players to approach the games in a lot of ways I didn't expect them to, which naturally resulted in me finding a lot of bugs I didn't realize existed. Alongside the tutorial implementation, I will be entering a thorough QA phase to look for remaining critical issues.
Once I am confident that the game is stable and accessible as well as complete, we will launch a Demo on Steam. This is likely not going to be in October, but expect to see it available for play in November or early December.
I am really looking forward to the opportunity to share the joy players felt this weekend with you.
