A problem with Length
Added 2024-03-02 00:01:40 +0000 UTCSo a couple of weeks ago a added real progression into my game. with the ability to go down deeper to encounter new enemies and more items. but when trying to add more enemies i noticed i'm getting a real problem with the length of the game.
i've talked about the paradox with transformation based games. where a significant portion of the games content is locked behind losing. this problem gets exponentially worse the longer it takes to actually lose. for instance getting the snake transformation in my game will take around 10-15 minutes. while the goal is to make those 10-15 minutes as fun as possible it would still get repetitive. mostly because your naturally going to see those minutes as busy work.
now this game is a roguelike in nature and roguelikes don't seem to have this problem. and while that is the case i think the difference is in goal. in a roguelike the goal is to get further. in this game the goal is to get to new enemies to lose to.
honestly i didn't really have a solution to this, but as i'm writing this i think i came up with an answer. i think i'm going to start leaning into meta progression a lot more. turning this into more of a roguelite then a roguelike. maybe have the progression be directly tied to losing in different ways. this will speed up the early game and give some justification to the core mechanic. we can also incentivise actually going further down by having losing to the stronger monsters give more reward.
either way i hope this was an interesting enough read.
