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“Roguelike” has become a very common word when it comes to indie games. From “hades” to “dead cells”, “roguelike” is a genre entailing randomly generating levels and brutal, fast-paced gameplay. With the amount of indie games falling under this genre, it becomes almost difficult to tell them apart from one another. Although one game that stands out from the rest, is 2019’s “Streets of Rogue”.
“Streets of Rogue” is a game that combines the anarchy of open world games like “Grand Theft Auto” with the character choice of role-playing games. And due to its open-ended gameplay, it’s become a cult hit with fans of roguelikes. The game’s creator, Matt Dabrowski, was kind enough to give the Xavierite an inside look at his development process and his plans for the sequel.
Dabrowski started working on games at an early age.
“I started making games when I was around eight years old. Throughout my teenage years, I worked on small indie projects. This was around the late 1990s to early 2000s.”
“I continued doing that through college. I got a couple jobs in the games industry after college, but I got kinda fed up with it and ended up leaving. And then a few years later, it became more viable to publish indie games on Steam as a small developer. That’s around the time I got started on making ‘Streets of Rogue’.”
“Streets of Rogue” was an idea born from Dabrowski’s time playing games like “Fallout” and “Messiah” that allowed for an extensive amount of interaction with the game’s world.
“I was playing a lot of roguelikes at the time (of making ‘Streets of Rogue’), and I was thinking of different emergent scenarios that could play out. For example, you might be given a task to go into a building and steal some documents. I wanted the option to go in guns-blazing or use stealth to break in and steal the documents.”
“I also wanted ridiculous scenarios like having the option to free a bunch of gorillas to wreck the building, and you could retrieve the documents in the rubble. I thought that was a hilarious idea, and it was something I had to make.”
Creating interesting level design for a roguelike is tricky due to how the levels are randomly-generated, but Dabrowski was able to find a way to make the system work.
“The buildings were already prebuilt, but I used procedural generation to make them randomly scattered around the level. While there are certain rules in place on how many duplicates of a certain kind of building can exist in a level, there’s not as much rhyme or reason to it as you might think.”
Dabrowski also spoke about his experience working with indie game publisher tinyBuild.
“I was in talks with different publishers around 2016, and I went to the GDC (Game Developers Conference) where there was a lot of interest in the game. All I had to do with tinyBuild was send them a nice email, and they responded with the best offer I’d gotten.”
“They (tinyBuild) were very hands off. They pretty much let me do whatever I wanted, and they were only there to handle the hiring of new people and manage the IP. So far, working with them has been great.”
Speaking on his personal favorite character in the game, Dabrowski went for a controversial choice.
“My favorite would probably be the investment banker. I’ve seen people make tier lists of ‘Streets of Rogue’ characters, and he always ends up on the bottom. But I like playing as him because you’re always under pressure.”
“When you play as the investment banker, you always gotta be taking drugs to function. Playing as him makes me play more speedily since it usually takes me way too much time to get through a level.”
Dabrowski shared some early information on the upcoming sequel to “Streets of Rogue”, starting with his new “open world” direction for the game.
“While the game is still procedurally-generated, it’ll be a giant procedurally-generated world as opposed to something that’s level-based. The whole structure of the game will be different. It’s not like you’ll have to start all over again once you die; although, perma-death will be an option.”
“Mechanics will be similar to the first game. But the game will incorporate elements of survival and crafting to make it fit more into the open world structure. There’ll be forest-type areas, cities, dungeons. Overall though, the game will be a pretty seamless open world.”One major thing that Dabrowski plans to expand upon is the game’s quests.
“Quests will be greatly expanded on. I’ll be adding a lot more context to the quests as opposed to the first game where it was just ‘go here and do this’. For example, a shopkeeper might need you to kill a rival or destroy his store for a reward.”
Developing a seamless open world game has plenty of challenges in terms of programming, and Dabrowski talked about the challenges in making the world seamless.
“Previously, all the stuff in the game would already be loaded once you start a new level. In this sequel, everything is seamless, and you’ll have to be able to load in stuff on the fly. Since co-op will be a feature, we have to make sure the game keeps track of what each player is doing on different parts of the map.”
Dabrowski finished by expressing his excitement for finishing “Streets of Rogue 2”.
“I’m just excited to bring in this brand new experience that I hope people haven’t seen before. I think people are gonna be really happy with what I end up producing here. It’s like an open world game without a lot of the restrictions.”
“I’ve taken a lot of what I find to be boring and cumbersome in other open world games and replaced them with things that I find fun. You don’t see a lot of indie games attempt what this game is attempting. Compared to heavier open world games, this game feels lighter and breezier in terms of being able to do a lot in a short amount of time. I’m really just excited for people to get their hands on it.”
Although it’s still in its early stages of development, “Streets of Rogue 2” is already looking like a very promising upgrade to an already fun game. “Streets of Rogue 2” is slated to be released some time in 2022, and in the meantime, you can wishlist it on Steam here.