By their nature roguelikes are highly replayable, but can also serve as a great foundation on which to essentially multiply that replayability again and again. Adjust a few variables here, add a little content there, and you can have a very different game, one that some people admittedly might enjoy less, but they don’t have to play it--others who do like the the alternative mode have a whole new way to interact with an otherwise familiar world, or take it as a challenge depending on how it’s designed.
What I’m calling “special modes” includes everything from timed events to challenges and conducts, basically different ways to play the same game, primarily ways which are explicitly codified by the game, although non-codified alternatives are also within the scope of this discussion.
Why Special Modes?
There are many good reasons to including special modes in a roguelike. Here are some of the advantages I’ve encountered during my work with them over the years:
Value: Well obviously as with any additional content, there’s more value for players. This also translates to value for the wider community as well, since special modes serve as another source of interaction whether it’s sharing stories, bragging rights, or just talking strategy.
Replayability: Special modes can require players to explore whole new strategies within the context of a body of knowledge they’ve already accumulated about the game so far, just seen in a different light, making an already replayable genre that much more replayable.
Learning: Having seen the game in a new light, some of the knowledge gained through these alternative experiences can even translate back to improved skills while playing the main game.
Experimentation: Special modes enable players, and most importantly the developer, to experiment with new ideas that may even make it into the game proper--the design can go out on a limb here without any real repercussions. Of course you can already do this with prereleases/beta releases/EA/whatever, but the idea here is that these mods can also continue to live on on their own, without having an impact on the game as well, for those who choose to play them.
Interlude: As a developer, sometimes it can take a while to put out a major update. In the meantime, rather than keeping players waiting too long for something new, why not release a special mode to play around with? (Note this category also includes postludess as well, breathing new life into a game after most or all of its updates are out there and development is “complete.”)
Efficiency: Handling special modes as “interludes” is also made easier by the fact that they’re generally not that hard to implement. You get lots of bang for your buck in terms of dev time here, due to reusing not just assets, as you might with an expansion or DLC, but basically reusing pretty much “the entire game” and just changing the experience, possibly even significantly, in a relatively short time. This generates a lot of low-cost value.
Naturally it makes more sense to apply special modes to an existing expansive project, since there’s more content and systems to work with, though technically many of the same characteristics can apply to any roguelike, large or small. Still, these modes are more of an optional “extended development” sort of goal, and if the base game isn’t yet complete or at least itself an already compelling experience, then clearly more work needs to be focused there first :P
Sample Cases
To demonstrate some of the above, let’s look at the range of Cogmind’s special modes, which take multiple forms.
Timed events
A few times over the past couple years I’ve added special modes that trigger automatically at a certain time, for everyone to participate in. Of course there is/should also be a way for people to opt out of this if they’d like to play a regular run during that period, but I also make it so that these modes don’t kick in unless a player has already finished several runs and has some experience (or in the case of one of the events, a fair bit of experience).
I’ve seen a number of indie devs do holiday-themed events these days, though most don’t seem very expansive, maybe just a little change or bit of content here or there.
April Fools Day is a good candidate if only because the theme can be a combination of something totally crazy/funny/unexpected. Plus of course there’s the fun result that some people don’t even believe the news is true, while for those who learn it’s a real thing it also kinda counteracts the growing internet annoyance at all the fake game-related announcements people wish were true xD. I like making an April Fools announcement about features everyone can actually play with.
I’ve done a couple of these so far, starting in 2018 with Launcher Mode. This one is a good example of a quick modification that changes the entire experience in interesting ways. All it does is essentially convert all obtainable weapons to a random launcher instead. Launchers are powerful, but also resource-hungry and not great at solving every sort of challenge, so strategizing ways around their shortcomings (with a more limited set of options) is a pretty new kind of experience. Plus players get to use fun weapons that tend to be more rare in regular runs :)
Sample map area with all items replaced by random launchers for April Fools Day 2018.
Being put together so quickly there were a couple of oversights, like at first enemies could still drop their weapons and you could arm up with non-launcher weapons that way, but I fixed the main issues with a quick patch shortly after release.
From conception to implementation to deployment, this entire mode took only an hour to put out, and wasn’t even planned at first, but literally on the morning of 4/1 a player asked about April Fools and it sparked an idea (another reason having an active community is so great--lots of interaction to spark new ideas). Overall a relatively small effort for big gains.
Unfortunately I don’t know how many people actually played because at the time I simply decided to deactivate score uploading if using that mode to avoid polluting the leaderboard with non-standard runs, but news about the mode did get posted around (and even attracted attention from new buyers) and people thought it was fun, or at least funny even if they didn’t play :P
Certainly the AFD (April Fools Day) data could be directed elsewhere, but I wasn’t thinking about it then, and there wasn’t time much time to think through doing that anyway--it was already the morning of release!
In April 2019, however, I once again released a special mode, and this time I had both more experience and some time to dedicate to redirecting scores for this mode so we could get some player data, and a dedicated leaderboard. Participation was limited (42 players) since the leaderboards are opt-in and it was just a timed event, but it was nice to be able to look at some stats from the runs.
Cogmind April Fools Day 2019 Leaderboard
The theme for AFD 2019 was “Pay2Buy,” where players don’t find or salvage spare parts, but instead earn coins and buy items from the “Cogshop.” There’s even a market economy, loot boxes, and special deals!
Buying items from the Cogshop.
This was most certainly not a one-hour job like AFD 2018.
I spent a week designing and putting together the Cogshop and related mechanics, but I think it was a week well spent since as per the “interlude” concept mentioned above, it gave me something new to put out there during a lull of regular releases. The previous release was 7 weeks before 4/1, and now 7 weeks later (as I still work on some extremely time-consuming features) the next major release still hasn’t hit, so yeah we really needed a little something out there :P
Pay2Buy actually wasn’t the first idea entertained this year--in the run up to April 1st I experimented with turning Cogmind into a real-time game, but that didn’t feel like it would be fun for a majority of players so I dropped it. I talked about this mode and its design on Patreon here (patrons only).
Another important detail about these particular “timed” events, is that I built them to also be available after the event period. Not everyone who might want to can necessarily play on April Fools Day, so just like there’s a method for players to opt out of the events, they can also opt in on other days (both handled via command line switch). This wasn’t true in 2018--back then the advice was simply “change your system date when you start a new run,” but it’s kind of annoying to require that players mess with their system for something like this! I added the mode-forcing feature this year.
So these event modes have become permanent optional features. They’re simple and/or isolated enough that there shouldn’t really be much maintenance involved in future versions, may as well make them available to everyone down the line :D
Late last year we had another timed event which I approached very differently: “Limited Edition Holiday Mode 2018.”
Cogmind Limited Edition Holiday Mode 2018 logo
Running from December 20th through January 1st, the highlight of this event was getting PRESENTS.
The Scrapyard is full of presents! Who could've done this...
Go ahead, open it!
Opening each present revealed one or more items, really good stuff, and available right in the starting area. Not just any good stuff, though, the majority were chosen from among 17 brand new holiday-themed items, some with new mechanics (see this followup announcement for details).
Cogmind Limited Edition Holiday Mode 2018 Present - Black Coal Demo
Dropping a piece of “Black Coal” outside a Garrison and making a run for it.
A few of the less special items were randomized, but most I handpicked for each day to allow for different experiences through different combinations, of course taking into account special days like Christmas Eve, X-mas Day, and New Years. The craziest, flashiest item was reserved for reigning in the new year:
Behold, the RPDS!
RPDS Demo: Now With More Tiles Edition
Yeah it looks OP, but it’s also an insane drain on
