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A Deathless Roguelike - Jack Turps (jackturps.com)
submitted 8 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) by to c/gamedev@programming.dev
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In Love Me Not you are a flower that climbs out of a cave. The cave has been cursed by a witch, so the level is regenerated above you whenever you fall.

This is similar to the procedurally generated levels in infinite runners like Doodle Jump, except that instead of erasing the entire level on a failure, Love Me Not only erases the most recent sections. This style of level generation is novel to me. For the purposes of this post I’ll call it spool generation.

I often simplify a player’s time with a game into a “novice period” and an “expert period”. These are usually characterised by different goals. In Love Me Not a novice’s objective is to escape the cave by any means necessary, while an expert’s objective is to escape the cave as fast as possible.

Spool generation had some natural effects on the novice period:

[expert period] I wanted to find a scoring system that could bring spool generation back into the decision space of an expert player.

Love Me Not on itch.io

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[–] 4 points 7 hours ago (1 child)

I wonder if they generate items/XP as part of the level generation, and if the spool generation means that those get regenerated as well when you fall. That would make it exploitable by just falling over and over (and the exploiting isn't very fun in itself).

Although, I guess, if you set it as the goal to escape as quickly as possible, then that might already naturally give players a reason to not intentionally do it, and also help struggling players out. Probably depends a lot on the details...

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 4 hours ago

    In this game at least, there doesn't seem ot be any items or XP.

    But I thought of this as an interesting mechanic as well when they mentioned expert period and deliberately falling to regenerate the following area. It leads to a weighing of lost time due to falling/falling back vs the chance of better alternatives.

    Even for a novice period, falling, whether deliberately or accidentally, and getting a better outcome doesn't seem like a bad thing to me. They describe how that makes progression easier by chance rather than through explicit deliberate game design with easing and fallbacks.

    Other games and game mechanics make use of risk vs potential reward too. I'm thinking of roguelites right now where you can pick something up or not or activate something at a cost. A gain may not be guaranteed. Or it offering a reroll of items on offer.

    I don't see this much different. The form is different through level generation/spooling and a different cost, but the tension or strategy mechanism is not fundamentally different in my eyes.

    I guess it comes down to what you see as "exploitation". When you see it as deliberate game design it's not really exploitation. If it's deliberately part of the influenced scoring then it's not an exploit either. Even if it's multiplayer, it can be part of game depth and game strategy.

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