Recently, I’ve been fascinated with deckbuilders and card-based games. There’s a massive variety of them out there; Shroom and Gloom combines card collecting with ‘Roguelite’ gameplay and spooky environments to hammer home the ‘dungeon crawler’ feel of the classics (Cave Noir..etc). Inscryption keeps the session playstyle of ‘Roguelites’, but adds in heavy and varied RPG elements with focuses on exploration (limited) and bizarre (the good kind) narrative directions.
This recent change in gaming direction has caused me to think about how far and what other directions can we take this plucky combination of deckbuilding and narrative RPGs/Roguelites, the upcoming logs being the result of my delve into this train of thought. The project, so dubbed will consider how I can combine:
- Deckbuilding
- Roguelite: Single Session Playthroughs
- Roguelite: Persistent player development
- Roguelite: Procedural Dungeons
- Zork: Turn-based movement
- Zork: Puzzles
- RPG: Overarching narratives
There’s a very specific reason that I’ve mentioned Zork; the reasons will become clear down the track.
The end product should be a weird little game that argues with itself over what influences will reign supreme. Only playtesting will reveal the answer to this, but I’ve got my starting point!
Stay tuned.