Spelunky (Boss Fight Books Book 11)

by Derek Yu

Unimpressed with my platformer prototypes, I turned to roguelikes. But after Aquaria’s complex development I was still attracted to simplicity and minimalism, so I decided my roguelike would be very contained. The player would only be allowed to carry nine items, regardless of their weight, and the actions they could perform on the items would be limited to “use” and “throw.” Another constraint I placed on the game was that each floor of the game’s dungeon had to take place on a single grid of 15x15 tiles. Compare that to NetHack’s 24x80 tile levels, for example. To generate a dungeon in such a small space, I had to forgo the twisting passages that lead you from one room to the other. Instead, the nine rooms would be crammed together like tiny cubicles in an office space. This seemed reasonable—even though the larger dungeons of NetHack allow for more variety, not much of the time spent traversing the long hallways between rooms is interesting. There’s a reason why NetHack includes a special key that lets you “fast move” from one end of a hallway to another, stopping in the middle only if something crosses your path. Whereas the hallways are generally just hallways, a room in NetHack can be many things. At the most basic, they’re small chess-like boards that contain monsters, treasures, and traps, but they can also be shops, monster zoos, or throne rooms. Sometimes they’re pitch black and you have to bump your way through. It wasn’t long before I stopped working on my rogu...

roguelike. By the time I had made a couple of generic dungeons populated with enemies, traps, and shops, I was running into the same problem I ran into with my previous prototypes—distilling roguelikes into something simpler was a fun exercise, but it didn’t add anything new to the genre. So once again, my mind began to drift away, from this little puzzle I had in front of me to the rest of my puzzle pieces. When I started, there was only a large, disorganized pile strewn in front of me, but now there were some smaller puzzles partially completed. Platformers and roguelikes, platformers and roguelikes. I asked myself, what is it that I like about platformers? I’m a more action-oriented game player and I like how easy they are to pick up and play. I like the tension behind each jump. What didn’t I like about platformers? I didn’t like the repetitiveness of playing the same levels over and over again, and the reliance on memorizing level layouts to succeed. What did I like about roguelikes? I liked the variety that the randomly-generated levels offer and how meaningful death is in them. What didn’t I like about roguelikes? I didn’t like the repetitiveness of certain tasks that were required to succeed, like polypiling, and the reliance on memorizing commands. Platformers and roguelikes, platformers and rogue- likes… Then it clicked!