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Content Density:

• Content in this case is referring to both challenges and rewards:
  • Monsters, traps, dangerous terrain etc.
  • Items, friendly NPCs, intractable objects like fountains and tables etc.
• Content density is the amount of content per tile ratio
• There should be a lot of contrast in content density. What we want to avoid is the player slogging through 'room' after 'room' of evenly distributed stuff.
• Wilderness zones should be generally low density, dungeons are medium density while boss rooms, monster camps, special rooms etc are high density.
• Generally speaking 'most' of the world is low density. This is absolutely critical as it allows the player to freely move about and travel to areas he actually wants to be in without having to fight every step of the way.
• Content density is recursive in nature:
  • Wilderness is low density in general but:
    • There will be sub-areas that have medium content density ex. the area surrounding a dungeon entrance, a graveyard full of undead, a bunch of tar pits in the desert.
    • There will be locations that have high content density ex. a camp of monsters, a small tower or fortress, a clearing in the woods with corrupted druids.
  • Dungeons are medium density in general but:
    • Much of the dungeon is still relatively sparsely populated ex. corridors connecting rooms will typically not have enemies or treasure.
    • Special rooms may have very high content density ex. a unique monster with his gang of minions and a trove of treasure.

Gating:

• Gating refers to some challenge that blocks player progress until some solution is found.
  • Specifically challenging monster or boss.
  • Environmental hazard, trap or terrain.
  • Variations on locked doors: magical barriers, draw bridges, etc.
• A soft gate has multiple solutions.
• A hard gate has a single, specific solution.
• The degree of soft/hard gating will be based on how specific and important the thing behind the gate is.
  • If a gate is blocking access to a location that all or most characters will need or want to access then it should be a soft gate. For example, any gates that block progress towards actually winning the game should be very soft i.e. passable through many different ways.
  • If a gate is blocking access to some highly specific location then its preferred to use hard gates. For example a gate blocking access to an Amulet of Fire Mastery.
  • Geographically speaking, could imagine soft gates in the center of the world blocking access to the main path while hard gates are on the edge of the world blocking access to specific rewards.
• Another factor is that soft gates will generally have a lot of stuff behind them, as in entire zones or multiple zones.
• Hard gates on the other hand will typically have much less stuff behind them, possibly even just a single small room with a single important item.

Way to Much Content:

• Critical to the games strategy element.
• A single run should involve the player only clearing a small fraction of the game world. He will be going to specific zones and avoiding others.
• Within a single zone, the player should only be clearing a small faction of the zone. He will be going to specific sub-areas, camps, special rooms, etc. and avoiding other places.
• In combination with the Pressure Clock, this forces the player to make choices, deciding what to clear and what to avoid.
• Conversely however, a single zone should be large enough that if, for some reason, the player does want to spend a ton of time clearing it for some reward, there's more than enough content for him to do this.
  • I'd like to avoid the player just pacing back and forth in already explored terrain waiting for respawns to kill.
  • As an example: a player may decide that he just absolutely must have every single piece of the unique mage armor set that drops in The Arcane Tower. He's determined to stay there until he gets all the pieces. The Arcane Tower must be large enough to let him do this.
  • Of course there is a limit to the size and this is where RNG comes in. Its entirely possible that the player wastes his time clearing the entire zone and still doesn't get every piece. This is totally fine and even desirable as it will force the player to rethink his strategy.
• I'd also like to emphasize the concept of diminishing returns:
  • Going to a zone and making a bee line to the boss, killing him and getting some major artifact is an extremely efficient use of limited time (Pressure Clock).
  • Going to some or all of the special rooms i.e. mini-bosses and killing them is also quite rewarding.
  • Perhaps the player knows that the items he wants drop within a specific sub-area of a zone and he chooses to just hunt in this one area, ignoring the rest.
  • Generally speaking a full clear should be an extremely inefficient use of time.

Choice vs Decision:

Though these words are typically used interchangeably and I will likely use them interchangeably in the rest of this document I think its important to make a distinction here since a huge amount of the vision depends on this distinction. As working definitions lets use the following terms:

• Choice: no right or wrong, better or worse option. Based on opinion, preference, or personal taste etc.
• Decision: has right or wrong, better or worse options. Requires knowledge, analysis, intelligence, strategy etc. to make the 'right' choice.

In Rogue Fable III the player will predominantly be making decisions rather than choices.

• This is also true of rogue-likes in general, strategy games, competitive multiplayer games. Any game with concrete win/lose states and some kind of external pressure that limits the players options.
• This is in stark contrast to RPGs, simulators, creativity games, and sand box or open world type games in general. These games typically do not have concrete win/lose states and don't have any external pressure.

Understanding this distinction is critical so that we don't accidentally start emulating or thinking in terms of games in the second category.

In Rogue Fable III the only real choices the player makes are those at the start of the game: game mode, class, and race. The player may also at this point choose to follow some self imposed restrictions or attempt to win the game in some specific way. Note that these last points are distinct from all subsequent decisions in that the player isn't worried about optimizing his success.

• The player chooses to attempt to win the game with only his fists not because it is optimal but because he wants to challenge himself.
• The player chooses beforehand that he wants to go to the core regardless of how the game plays out because he's never been there.

All subsequent 'choices' are really decisions i.e. there is theoretically a right or wrong, better or worse option given the current context, even if its impossible to determine precisely based on the complexity of the game. Furthermore a choice that seemed 'the best' in the current time may later turn out to be a bad. For example using a potion when you really didn't need to and running out later. This distinction should be kept in mind throughout all of the games design.

We are making a game that:

• Challenges the player to play optimally in order to win.
• Actually causes the player to lose if he does not play optimally.
• Forces the player to have a plan to win, analyze his current situation, set sub-goals, determine his immediate course of action, constantly reassess the previous points as the situation changes.
• Forces the player to make hard decisions i.e. he can't have everything.
  • Cannot understate how important the Pressure Clock is to this.

We are not making a game that:

• Offers 'freedom' to choose 'whatever you want'.
• Allows the player to explore the world at his leisure, complete all the quests, experiences all the content etc.
• Lets the player role play or 'express themselves creativity'

In some sense this comes down to the distinction of games as competition vs games as toys. We are absolutely making a game that is a 'competition'.

Knowledge, Predictability and Looking Ahead:

• In order for the player to be able to make strategic decisions, the game needs to be predictable enough that knowledge can be learned and applied across multiple runs.
• This must be carefully balanced against the RNG which forces the player to suddenly change his plans and improvise.
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• Lets consider an experienced player who has a lot of knowledge of the game:
  • He knows that in order to win he will need to fight his way into Yendors fortress.
  • He knows that Yendors fortress contains the widest variety of challenges of any location in the game and so he will need to assemble a character that can meet all of these challenges.
  • He knows that the pressure clock will not allow him to assemble a NetHack style ascension kit that litterally covers all bases so he plans out, based on his starting race and class a desired build that he thinks will let him handle Yendor.
  • He then uses his knowledge of the game to determine what zones, sub-zones, bosses, sub-bosses etc. he will need to 'clear' in order to get to the build he wants.
  • Knowing that sub-zones, sub-bosses and many of the details of his plan vary from run to run based on RNG he has a whole bunch of redundancies in the back of his mind.

Looking Ahead:

• Looking ahead is a critical concept and is basically the idea that due to RNG even a knowledgeable player must still deal with a high degree of unpredictability in each run.
• Looking ahead is basically the act of revealing the general contents of a section of the map that has not yet been explored.
• Might reveal: zone-type, sub-zone-type, presence of bosses, sub-bosses, special NPCs, special objects or items etc.
• Achieved by finding map fragments, using crystal balls, paying npcs etc.
• Looking ahead lets the player move and act in a much more determined manner i.e. he doesn't just have to clear EVERYTHING, randomly stumbling into things without any warning or forethought.
• A player can enter a dungeon because he knows a boss he wants is there. He can then make a reasonably direct line to the bosses chamber, ignoring 90% of the dungeons contents.