Excerpt

Rogue Legacy. The title evokes its lineage: roguelike elements such as permadeath, the consequence of erasing a character after the player dies; procedural generation, the use of algorithms to create levels so players never explore the same environment twice; and copious amounts of loot with which to lay waste to hordes of enemies.

However, Teddy and Kenny Lee's earliest design contained no roguelike tropes. Both brothers got hooked on Demon's Souls, a 3D action-RPG released in 2009 by Japanese developer FromSoftware based on challenging encounters and fixed levels. "It was great because during that time, The Binding of Isaac, Spelunky, and Demon's Souls were big hits, and the roguelike genre was becoming mainstream," Kenny remembered. "I don't know if it had been mainstream in the past, but it was picking up steam when we were looking to make a game."

Teddy and Kenny aspired to fuse certain elements of Demon's Souls and its 2011 spiritual sequel, Dark Souls, with the action and platforming of Castlevania. As a joke, and because they had to call the embryonic game something until they arrived at a proper title, they referred to their project as Dark Souls 2D, or DS2D.

The notion of meticulously handcrafted environments came from Demon's Souls. The levels in FromSoftware's RPG never alter, a critical component of its design: Enemies are so difficult, combat so weighty, that players are encouraged to inch through areas in order to learn terrain and memorize enemy positions. Dying starts them back at the beginning of an area, but their next turn usually goes smoother thanks to their knowledge of the environment and its inhabitants.

Demon's Souls changed up permadeath in a way that Kenny and Teddy found compelling. Upon dying, players leave a bloodstain that holds their souls, the game's two-in-one currency and experience. Players can retrace their steps to the bloodstain and collect their souls, but dying also resets enemies and traps, making the return trip perilous. Should players die again before collecting their souls, their bloodstain is wiped away forever and replaced by a new one. It's a firm but fair system that gives players a chance to reclaim what they lost.

"What struck me about Demon's Souls was it was a more accessible version of a roguelike," said Kenny. "They took some elements of roguelikes and the concept of consequence, which gives you incredible feelings of achievement when you've done something momentous because of the consequences always looming over you. Demon's Souls was the middle ground: you'd fail, but you didn't have to start over. When you beat massive monsters, you'd get lots of souls and could level up. I really liked that. We wanted to do something similar."

Teddy set DS2D in a medieval fortress consisting of numerous rooms and corridors. Every square inch would be designed by Teddy and Kenny. Every screen would teem with enemies like skeletons, wizards able to cast fireballs and drift about, and stationary turrets; platforms that players could jump onto or hop down from to reach treasure chests or passageways; hazards like spike traps; and treasures that augmented the player's physical and magical strength. Learning the lay of the land and devising appropriate strategies to pick off monsters would be integral to survival, like in Demon's Souls.

"We even designed this super-complicated meta game where beating castles would lead to a mega castle that was 10,000 rooms large," Teddy said. "It was massive because we could generate whatever we wanted, and it would never change."

Like Demon's Souls, DS2D would grant access to droves of melee weapons and magic spells. Teddy devised a combat system that let players perform three-hit combos for additional damage. Players started over from scratch every time they died, saturating every encounter with urgency and consequence.

Teddy's design also called for solving brainteasers to progress, a departure from the exploration-focused roguelike genre and Demon's Souls experience. "You'd be hitting all these puzzles," said Teddy, "and your map would be updating to accommodate them: here are all these puzzles that you haven't solved. They weren't the stupid 'Oh, just hit this guy ten times' [style of riddle]. You had to get items and abilities, and the abilities had to be used in abstract ways to solve the puzzles."