Inkbound Dev Explains Roguelite’s Popularity Explosion
There’s no denying how popular roguelite games are these days with games like Hades, Dead Cells, Rogue Legacy and even Inkbound catching the eye of gamers worldwide. While there’s no shortage of roguelite games in the market, just why are studios so keen on making ’em?
This is something we asked Inkbound’s developer Shiny Shoe in an exclusive chat with MP1st. Creative Director Andrew Krausnick explains it from an indie point’s perspective.
MP1st: There’s a lot of roguelites that are available now and coming out in the future. What is it about the genre that seems to have exploded in popularity in your opinion?
Andrew Krausnick: I would say there’s an explosion of, smaller and indie teams and so on, like ourselves, who are a lot of bigger games are now adding roguelike DLC, it’s kind of the, the meme joke, the thing that’s really compelling about it for us and a lot of other people is that, A long time ago, one of the creators of Magic the Gathering explained it as a game that was like bigger than the box, the permutation of all the little individual pieces make this really big play space and thing you can think about because they all combine so well together, and I think, it’s very similar with Roguelikes, like you can build a lot of relatively small pieces of content that all combine together to make this game that feels very big this possibility space That’s very big all these cool combinations, it is within scope of smaller teams to make games that feel much much bigger They get played this much bigger way.
They get played for a very long period of time. It obviously has a lot of challenges and, a lot of us are math-y design nerds and those challenges suit us well. How do we balance all these pieces together? How do we make interesting content? How do we make it understandable? Those are things that a small team can handle.
They’re challenges we can take on. Unlike making, the next high fidelity, Assassin’s Creed or something. We could never do it. It’s just impossible. But this kind of challenge is something we can do at our scale. People are loving it. People are really enjoying it. They probably weren’t popular for a long time.
It’s like, who wants to restart every single time? And then games started figuring the answer to that out and, fans were there.
Krausnick does make a lot of sense. I mean, indie devs obviously will have a hard time matching graphical quality and fidelity against a huge AAA studio that’s backed by a publisher. But, for roguelites, if you can nail a proper visual flair, and compelling mechanics, you can keep gamers occupied for hours on end without restoring to seasonal content drops and whatnot.
In the same chat, Krausnick said that he’d “definitely love” a console version of the game, though there’s nothing to announce just yet. Stay tuned to our full interview with Krausnick hitting the site very soon.
In case you haven’t tried Inkbound yet, go read our review of it here.
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