Making Subnautica a roguelike
Wisp
Join Date: 2007-12-18 Member: 63211Members, Reinforced - Diamond
Join Date: 2007-12-18 Member: 63211Members, Reinforced - Diamond
Hi all,
It's interesting to me that UWE announced Subnautica, despite apparently not having made many concrete decisions on what the gameplay will be like. This is strange, but also exciting as a member of the community. It seems that our input is more likely to affect major elements of the design.
I've heard some members of the community propose elements similar to Minecraft, where Subnautica would be more about world building and sort of conquering nature. I love the feeling in Minecraft that you are entering a hostile space and creating civilization out of it. I don't think Subnautica's settings lends itself well to this type of gameplay, however. I would like toward games like FTL: Faster Than Light for inspiration.
FTL is a roguelike, which is a very broad genre consisting of two primary elements: randomly generated worlds and permanent death. I already saw a developer say that Subnautica's environments will be procedurally generated. So effectively what I want to see is permanent death. In my imagination, Subnautica is a game that starts you off with a basic submarine and lets you explore the depths in search of resources to upgrade and improve your submarine. There doesn't necessarily have to be an end goal in mind, but there could be. Everything would be a risk/reward scenario where you could try and sneak past dangerous critters in search of treasure, or eschew combat in favor of protecting your ship. Permanent death in roguelikes creates a great feeling of tension, because every action you make threatens hours of progress.
Something to think about.
It's interesting to me that UWE announced Subnautica, despite apparently not having made many concrete decisions on what the gameplay will be like. This is strange, but also exciting as a member of the community. It seems that our input is more likely to affect major elements of the design.
I've heard some members of the community propose elements similar to Minecraft, where Subnautica would be more about world building and sort of conquering nature. I love the feeling in Minecraft that you are entering a hostile space and creating civilization out of it. I don't think Subnautica's settings lends itself well to this type of gameplay, however. I would like toward games like FTL: Faster Than Light for inspiration.
FTL is a roguelike, which is a very broad genre consisting of two primary elements: randomly generated worlds and permanent death. I already saw a developer say that Subnautica's environments will be procedurally generated. So effectively what I want to see is permanent death. In my imagination, Subnautica is a game that starts you off with a basic submarine and lets you explore the depths in search of resources to upgrade and improve your submarine. There doesn't necessarily have to be an end goal in mind, but there could be. Everything would be a risk/reward scenario where you could try and sneak past dangerous critters in search of treasure, or eschew combat in favor of protecting your ship. Permanent death in roguelikes creates a great feeling of tension, because every action you make threatens hours of progress.
Something to think about.
Comments
But damn FTL underwater is bringing salt to my tears, that would be beautiful.
I'd hope there to be a free load/save option none the less.
However, Wisp, you are definitely getting somewhere with the last paragraph of your post.
Ok lets put it this way: You're alive, in a roguelike, that MEANS Something, it is generally an achievement in itself to say you survives #mins or #levels. In other games, there's no meaning to being alive, Being alive is a fact, a normality. This is why roguelikes have much more replayability in them.
but when you die you feel frustrated yes? That's the point, if you feel frustrated, it just eggs you on to do better this time, which means, replay value!
also, if you add in score and silly death things, dying isn't always that much of a bad thing.
It also makes very difficult enemies or environments feel more frustrating and cheesy as you don't necessarily get enough time to learn how they work unless the game is designed in such a way that you are expected to die quickly and can respawn and get back to where you died extremely quickly. With a "hardcore" option you can still have really tough challenges in your game as players can play the normal mode first to learn how to deal with them, or can simply fall back to that if they decide that permadeath just isn't for them. Besides, there's something to be said of the satisfaction earned when you conquer a game by drowning it in a pile of your own corpses.
Disclaimer: I don't really know any more than you do about the game yet, so this is pretty much just conjecture based off (what I think are) similar games like Minecraft, Terraria, Starbound, etc.
Second edit: FTL is absolutely fantastic and I love it to death. I just don't think it's the right fit for SN.
It seems to me that many of the best rogue-likes have a mechanic that forces you to not stay in a bubble, keeping you on the move and hunting for more supplies. FTL uses the Rebel fleet and Spelunky uses the ghost for this purpose. If you stay in one area for too long, the game will come after you with a vengeance. Perhaps in Subnautica's this element could be represented by fuel. Your fuel will constantly decrease, so you have to move to stay alive. You will be able to stay in one area for a good amount of time, but not too long - otherwise you'll get stranded and die.
I think my FTL games average between 30 minutes to a few hours. That seems like a good length of time for playing Subnautica, no?
I guess it depends how far the developers want to expand on the construction aspects versus the survival aspects. If the game really is about world building, then a permanent space to express yourself is critical. Pouring your time into building space only to lose everything is usually more frustrating than anything. But how much building can you really do underwater? I'm guessing most construction is modifying and upgrading your submarine, along with other equipment. That's along the lines of what you do in FTL.
I disagree that permadeath makes a game inaccessible to a wide audience. There are plenty of very popular rogue-lies.
Most games have a purpose. Get to the last boss, save the world/princess/sibling/dog etc., conclude the story. Beat the game. Win.
I'm hoping SN stays away from this idea of finality, the thought that:
"You've seen it all, you've done it all, turn off the game, do something else."
Most games play similarly every time (even if they're fun, eventually you get bored and move on), and SN seems to have the potential to play very differently over time...even going so far as to say that if you decided to start over, your game would be completely different and not resemble your last game at all as far as what you see and how your ship turns out.
Maybe the first time around you made a ponderous floating lab and crawled along, collecting specimens of everything and developed new technology.
Maybe the next time you made a quick, maneuverable vessel and tried to get to the furthest reaches of the eternal ocean.
Well done. Im not a huge fan of permadeath but having the option sure is a big bonus. There is a market in many games for both.
As for a roguelike… It could work well. With a game like this I'd like to see some hardcore elements such as difficult combat, or some form of actual gameplay mechanics that makes the game a challenge; a challenge that can, with time, be overcome. In my opinion the best games are difficult but give the player a lot of room to improve upon and learn, such as Dota. Dota is "hardcore" in many ways but the more one learns, the more forgiving the game seems. That's what I'd like to see in this game. Just my 2 cents.