When I was working on Spelunky, I focused on just three attributes of roguelikes that to me held the essence of the genre: Randomized level generation. Permanent death (also known as “permadeath”), whereby the player has one life and cannot reload their game to take back mistakes. A ruleset for physical interactions that is shared by the player, non-player characters (NPCs), and items. The third attribute is my version of “monsters share rules and behaviors with players” and it extends not only to monsters but to items as well. In many games, monsters and items are coded separately and handled
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