Turning “Guardians of Gridvale” into a roguelike/roguelite

Hi friends, fans & family! I have a bunch of text coming your way today so I’ll waste no time and get right to it!

Genre change

A major change perhaps… or not? I am going to make “Guardians of Gridvale” a roguelike/roguelite. I know it sounds like a big change but I promise that most of the things will remain as they are: you will still manage a group of heroes with the same tactical, turn based gameplay! There’s just gonna be a greater focus on randomisation and less focus on a “main story”. The banter between heroes etc will still remain. Why am I doing this? Well here’s my reasoning but first a picture of the hero selection screen…

It was my intial idea

This game was born because I wanted to try to make something somewhat similar to ”Into the Breach” but with another setting and some different mechanics. I loved the idea of having banter between heroes and flesh that out in comparison and when I mentioned the game on social media a lot of people wanted a tactical RPG and not a roguelike. I caved but now I’m thinking that I shouldn’t have and need to be true to my initial ”vision”.

It’s a genre I love myself

I practically only play roguelikes/roguelites these days apart from those rare occasions where I have time to play something more time consuming (and that’s when I play my RPGs 🤪). I don’t have time to play more involved, epic story games at this moment in life unfortunately.

“Easier” to get the main loop in place

I practically get rid of the “main story” part of the game if I make a roguelike. Banter will remain but I don’t have to make an overarching story which probably wouldn’t be super good anyway. I also will have fewer parts that depend on each other allowing me to just make a beginning and an end and have whatever is randomized in between. Whether it is ACTUALLY easier remains to be seen but a lot of the things I have planned will be easier to implement with a few tweaks…

Possible to expand upon

Since the game will be made with replayability in mind, adding more heroes, items, maps and enemies is an obvious way of adding to the longevity of the game. It’s harder to make people come back to a game that has a big story focus once they’re done with it.

More commercially viable

Steam loves strategy games and roguelikes and while I’m definitely not making this for money my game will have a better shot at a tiny bit of “success” with streamers and the audience this way.

What will this mean for the game then?

⁃ The tactical combat will remain untouched. You’ll still use the environment, the swingmeter and see enemies attack intentions.

⁃ Maps will be handmade. The game will pick a map and randomize enemy and hero positions and maybe some other stuff but retain that “handmade” feel as much as possible

⁃ I won’t stray from my goal of having varied objectives. I don’t really like “kill all enemies” style missions

⁃ Banter between heroes and humor will remain a pillar of the design

⁃ Your starting party will be picked by you with more heroes appearing randomly during the course of a run. You’ll unlock heroes to get more to choose from.

⁃ There will be a bunch of items and equipment in the game. I’ll tell you more about those at some other point but here’s a picture for making it this far 😀

⁃ There might be “choose your adventure” type text situations to handle with different choices available depending on your current party etc. I say might because it’s not a priority but I think it would be fun to do. Still, that takes work and I don’t really have much time…

Loss conditions

What is the loss condition and what will carry over between runs? Good question. This and a lot of other things will be determined through experimentation together with you, the player.

I will be playing even more roguelikes/roguelites going forward so give me your recommendations! Games with a party of several characters are extra welcome!

Thanks for reading ❤️

// Luis