Why Soulcaster 3 Will Not Have Persistence Between Runs

I’m a big fan of generosity in game design. My past games have all had infinite lives and quick respawns. So get ready for a break from tradition:

When you die in Soulcaster 3, you lose everything.

There are no unlockables or upgrades you can take with you to make the next run easier or different.

But why, Ian, WHY…?

I realize how polarizing this is. AAA companies spend a lot of money on market research and focus testing, and they are pretty much all in agreement on game presentation: tell the player exactly what they do next, and if they make a mistake or die in the process, start them about five seconds back.  I have no doubt this is how most people like their game experience. It especially makes sense to cater to this if you’re spending $50 million making the game.

It seems like indies are given a bit more license to be brutally difficult. I’m not sure why, but maybe it’s just that those of us who don’t much like the “Disneyland ride” game experience are happy to get a bone thrown our way. So I’m taking this license and running with it, perhaps to an abusive level. (Generosity is not completely dead, either… more on that at the end.)

Scoring in Roguelikes

My new favorite YouTube channel is Matthewmatosis, a collection of in-depth game reviews and commentary. In-depth means really in-depth–30+ minutes in most of the videos. One of the most recent is on Pac-Man and scoring, which explores the phenomenon of the “perfect score” in Pac-Man: something made possible by the fact that a) the game is deterministic (the ghosts’ behavior is predictable and reliable), and b) the game has a finite number of a levels (not by design–but an integer overflow enforces this).

So for Pac-Man, there really is just a perfect score to attain, and the leaderboard shifted to who could do it the fastest. But there is actually a fastest-possible time as well, if you execute everything perfectly. So now it’s just an account of people who can attain the fastest time to the highest score.

Matthewmatosis offers a solution in the form of two missing ingredients: randomness, and unlimited time. They are both required, however, because random game elements (such as Tetris or a roguelike) combined with limited time means that top scorers are mostly at the mercy of the random number generator for a good score. And unlimited time without randomness turns the game into an endurance test, rather than a skill test.