MALL NINJA SHIT: Or, why decorative blades are terrible for practical use

Have you ever been to one of those knife stores where they sell fucking ridiculous knives, where like, the hilt looks like a dragon and there’s like 800 fuckin’ points on it, and it looks like it’s a million times more likely to stab you than someone you actually get in a knife fight with?

That’s the edgy 90s aesthetic in a nutshell. It’s impractical, overly designed to appeal to its own niche, and completely and totally unusable in any functional setting.  And despite overly-designed cheese knives, leather trenchcoats, and guns with 3 magazines, six barrels, and two ejection ports...that’s all aesthetic. It’s style over substance. And despite EDGEROGUES being a love-letter to that style, what it actually NEEDS in order to be a playable game and not a DeviantArt collection exported to PowerPoint, is substance.

To use our knife analogy, look at the KA-BAR. The ORIGINAL KA-BAR, not the 800 branded bullshit products they started selling once they realized the Rambo movies made them a hot item. It’s simple, it’s functional, and it’s iconic as hell. It is substance personified in the form of a knife. And you think “well shit, the KA-BAR worked for Rambo and he’s an overly-muscled, machine-gun-toting, PTSD-ridden dubiously-moral protagonist.”

What EDGEROGUES needs is more than a Damascus-patterned, rainbow-anodized surgical steel dragon-shaped knife with speed holes and blood grooves with optional karambit pommel. It needs that cutting function, that stabbing point, and that solid grip.

And you might be thinking, “why are you expounding on this at length when you don’t even have any functioning code?”

Because, simply put, EDGEROGUES is an ode to a style. And that’s why I want to stop talking about the style and focus on the substance. Edgy characters and grim cities drip with style, but what does any of that matter if the content itself sucks?

So let’s talk about substance. What EDGEROGUES needs to be, and will be eventually. 

First up - characters. The 90s, and really the entire “Dark Age of Comic Books,” featured an almost endless string of protagonists and antagonists covering every possible need you could think of. Humans, cyborgs, vampires, half-demons, renegade angels, and everything in between.  And the tools they used to dispatch their enemies were just as many and varied - guns, blades, magic, psychic powers, biologically-integrated symbionts, and more. So one of the main things I’d like to feature in EDGEROGUES is that freedom of character generation. The 90s had room for any idea, no matter how ludicrous or shitty it ended up becoming.

Next, and I’d argue more important, is the gameplay itself, from levels to mechanics. The levels within EDGEROGUES should be emblematic of the 90s - from rain-soaked cemeteries to back-alleys and dingy bars, to even the crazier concepts like cyberspace, the Astral Plane, and Hell itself. And those levels should be PLAYABLE - you can obviously move your character around in them and fight assorted badniks, but the point is that all of these level “sets,” and all of these enemy styles and everything else, should feel solid and be a part of the game. Nothing in EDGEROGUES, despite the “fuck it, why not?” attitude of 90s comic design, should feel out of place - simply put, I don’t want it to.

And that brings me to the final point of EDGEROGUES that I want to discuss, and something I think I’m going to expound upon at even more length later on in the development process - story. Every roguelike has a fairly generic story - NetHack, after all, has the entire plot of “you must descend into the Dungeon of Doom to recover the Amulet of Yendor for...Reasons”, and that’s widely considered the biggest example of the genre. But I want more than that. The point of 90s comics is that, no matter how laughably bad the story was, at least they had a story. Story informs everything, from level design to item choices to even enemies - after all, if you don’t even bother to establish who the Big Bad Boss IS, what’s the point of venturing into his hideout to defeat him?

And this is where I think EDGEROGUES can really shine - dynamically-generated story. I know it’s a bold statement considering I don’t have a single line of code written, but the fact is, I can string together concepts pretty solidly. And if I can figure out how to individually generate aspects of something, I can then tie those together, and so on, and so forth.

So here’s the idea: in EDGEROGUES, you pick your character, all the way down to their pronouns. (The game’s inspired by the 90s, but the year is 2020. We are INCLUSIVE and if you don’t like it, piss off.) Your choices for each character will inform later aspects of gameplay - a psychic character, for instance, will be more likely to load a tile set and level type of a psychic experiment lab gone horribly awry, whereas a military special-ops commando type may start in the jungles of Somewhere. And these choices will inform the story as well - let’s say your psychic warfare specialist, MINDSTRAIN THE UNBROKEN, is created.

Their starting location is generated at random, but weighted towards the “psy lab” tileset. After that, objectives and NPCs are generated - kill DOCTOR VERNE, the man who scrambled Mindstrain’s brain-meats and gave them psychic powers, and escape the lab. So when Mindstrain does that, they hit the exit node from the level, and then what? There’s got to be a next level, right? The plot arc continues. So a tileset for the next level is generated, the map is created, enemies are spawned, etc., and based on the previous storyline event and the current tileset, a new story beat is created. Mindstrain has escaped the lab, and finds himself in the sewers beneath Morris City, hunted by paramilitary goons and the cannibal mutants living in the sewers. The objective? Kill either the captain of the paramilitary goons, or the broodmother of the cannibal mutants. Escape the sewers, into...THE CITY. And so on and so forth, with story beats coming from who you are, where you’ve been, and where you’re going. I don’t expect or want it to be too detailed - too much detail would lead to the game eventually feeling samey, as there are only a finite number of combinations (although that number can easily rocket into the millions just by adding some base complexity.) 

But what does this do for SUBSTANCE?

It’s simple - we’ve taken the base, core function we need for a game (a cohesive reason to keep going) and dressed it up on the finery of the genre and its conceits. We have married style and substance. A KA-BAR with a dragon hilt.

NetHack, again, has the Amulet of Yendor. And no matter what character you make, no matter what you do, your course is always the same - descend through the Dungeon of Doom, recover the Amulet, ascend.

EDGEROGUES looks to shred the shit out of that and replace it with something darker and...well, edgier. A vampire commando may battle by night to save the city from Dracula himself, while a mutant swordsman may seek to tear down a corporation experimenting on the populace. It’s not supposed to be the same, despite being, in essence, the same game - and that’s another key concept of the 90s. All of these protagonists came out, they all had their holofoil covers and their variants and their trading cards, but what did they DO? Much like the oft-parodied synopses of Dragon Ball Z, “they fought some guy.” And that’s what every roguelike boils down to, in essence - you go through the maps, fight some little guys, and then fight the big guy to get the MacGuffin, and then you win. Or you die trying. Shit happens.

But how varied you can make that formula, and how much substance you can wrap in the leather duster of style, is what makes a good game. And that’s what I hope to capture with EDGEROGUES.