How to Fail at Making a RogueLike

Currently one of the most popular genres! As well as one of the most popular genre to fail at!

Contact:

Music:
Doh De Oh by Kevin MacLeod

[eovius]

I know that the "how to fail" gimmick is often used jokingly, but it is often more useful to look at what failed rather than what succeeded to avoid a Survivor bias

[RiptideDev]

Instructions unclear, accidentally developed Hades

[rubles]

Don't forget to throw in the possibility of RNG completely destroying any hope of continuing a run! Gotta keep the good players on their toes, by negating all skill with a luck wall!

[elfrangofrito]

Thank you for reminding me to reexamine every single one of my game design decisions in excruciating detail

[SpikeStudio]

i think its time to make a frustrating roguelike with items that dont tie into eachother, and requires extreme reflexes in an arena with no random generation

[AngeloAnderson]

I would love to see how to fail at making a boomer shooter or doom clone. This is honestly a great way to learn though at what mistakes you shouldn’t make!

[EdKolis]

I like how you both roasted and validated the roguelike community here.

[abhinavkuruvilajoseph]

This is the funniest series of videos on gamedev. Actually If we take pointers from it to what not to do then we could actually make good games. It is very educational if looked from the correct prespective

[druidofpies]

“Just add a dash mechanic and call it good” God this is so incredibly, painfully accurate. Seems like every dang game nowadays has a dash and it feels like something the devs thought was a “must have” rather than it actually complementing gameplay and movement mechanics

[Kirn.]

A lot of roguelikes and games in general nowadays just don't know how to make enemies fair or proper player scaling. They just throw bullshit at you and then when you die the response is "lolmao you're just mad you died skill issue"

[AlexitoDev-blcg]

I like the creative way you're using to show how a decent game should feel like

[bodamat]

I love videos about hot to fail. It's really funny, but also informative :D I really want to see more videos like this and would be good to see about tower defense games :)

[lorigulfnoldor]

I just love how your videos are slowly pushing me towards the BEST way of failing - towards never trying =) You make it sound so hard and hopeless, that giving up seems more and more of an option rather than an excuse! /j

[RobLang]

Haha! That's excellent. Particularly laughed at wasting time arguing about definitions.

[hdckighfkvhvgmk]

This one is especially interesting to me because of how well-regarded FTL: Faster Than Light is yet it does over half of the things listed in this video (I myself have 1500 hours in it), especially if you compare the base game to it's largest overhaul mod "Multiverse" which mostly attempts to patch up most of the "failures" of the base game (including some that aren't even mentioned in this video, such as losses that are out of the player's control or having the game end in the same place always), yet there are some people who are like "no we don't like this we want more similar to vanilla FTL."

[paulvictor]

That first point is so good... and I think that's something I started as such a victim of... Trying to pick a genre first... now I understand, games are just games, genres are just catergories we put them in to define them, but you can take aspects of many genres in one game and still have it work.

[Whiteeyegamedevs]

I watched this because I am working on making a love letter to one of my favorite games called Nuclear Throne and want to know everything that I should and should not do so thank you for the help.

[DiSyllar]

Lol great video. I'm actually working on a Roguelike and this is helpful, makes me realize some things you mention in the video that I wasn't aware I was doing like doing certain things because that's how other roguelikes do it, basically trying to fit my game into the genre instead of making it the way I want as you said.

[IndieGamingRoguelikes]

Oh wow great video! I don't know if I like more the minimalist art style of the video or the music that absolutely collides with the feelings you have while playing roguelik/tes 😂
Thanks for the non-white background I think that It could destroy me, nice touch.

[Ali-in-the-goblin-cave]

Thought this channel had way more subscribers than it does, great work! It's like terrible writing advice but game dev!