Standing Out in a Crowd - The Roguelike Dilemma
Recently, I have been playing a solid little roguelike called Galactic Vault. It is an FPS with tight gunplay and a fun upgrade path. It lacks a little in variety, but overall, it is a lot of fun. But the thing is, I am pretty sure most people wouldn’t have heard of it. Partly because no industry can cover the sheer amount of game releases, let alone one that has been butchered as savagely as ours. Partly it is because it is too expensive nowadays to advertise indie games and developers, PR and publishers need to rely on word of mouth or the hope that a popular content creator stumbles on it and falls in love. But, personally, I think that the reason Galactic Vault is unknown, despite its many, many great qualities, is that it commits the biggest sin of indie game design. That sin is, it simply doesn’t stand out.
You see, for all the fun shooting, interesting mechanics and clear passion that has gone into developing Galactic Vault, it is so easy to confuse it with a dozen other roguelike FPS titles I have played over the years. There are just so many of them. Doing a quick scan of just my own Steam Library, I counted at least 20 of them, most of which have been released in the last 5 years. That is just the FPS roguelikes; if I were to expand the criteria to include all roguelikes, I would dare say it would be over 100. This genre is fast becoming flooded, and being a pretty good game in an oversaturated genre is sadly just not enough to break out.
Now I am not a developer in any way, just an observer of the industry for a long time now, so please don’t take what I am saying as gospel. But I think, due to their very nature, a roguelike is an enticing proposition for developers for a couple of reasons. The first is resources. A roguelike often reuses assets and procedurally generates content, which means it is less taxing on artists and designers alike. The roguelike loop also means that the game really doesn’t have to be huge. With careful management of the upgrade systems, players keep coming back for more, gradually getting further and further. I mean, look at something like Dead Cells. It really only takes about an hour or two to get from the first level to the final boss, but who out there can say that they did that on their first try?
Finally, the big reason I feel like roguelikes are so popular at the moment is that when they hit with a crowd, they hit big. The aforementioned Dead Cells, Hades 1&2, Vampire Survivors, and more recently Ball X Pitt have all been runaway successes. Selling hundreds of thousands of copies, if not millions. So I imagine that it is easy for a developer to look at these successes and say, “Hey, they did it with limited resources and a small team, why can’t I? The thing is, for the most part, they can. The roguelike genre is filled to the brim with good games, games that are fun to play and have great mechanics, but they just don’t stand out.
Look at the list above, the games I highlighted as huge successes in the genre. They all have one thing in common: they are unique. Dead Cells brought humour and Metroidvania stylings to the genre. Hades came packing a Greek god soap opera that was difficult to ignore. Vampire Survivors used tactics usually found in poker machines to create an addictive reward loop, and Ball X Pitt took a classic arcade gameplay type and turned it on its head. They all have a reason as to why they stand out from the crowd. Of course, it helps that they are all cracking games to play.
This is where so many games in the genre fall down, standing out. They tend to all blur together, and it becomes harder and harder to remember them after you have put them down for a while. I say this with a love for the genre and many of the games within it. Galactic Vault feels like the prime example of this. For all its good points, and there are many, it just doesn’t do anything to make itself unique, to stand tall in a crowd of competitors. That is sadly a cardinal sin in this crowded marketplace and one that is likely to hamper its potential. Galactic Vault is the sort of game players purchase on a whim during a Steam Sale, only to play for a few hours and then promptly forget about, consigning it to the backlog forever.
But there is hope that these projects, often the first for small developers, can lead to bigger and better things. Games that stand out and strike their own path. The best example of this is Everspace. This was released as a fun game that took the sort of arcade space combat you found in games like Rogue Squadron and incorporated that into a roguelike loop. Everspace 2, however, was a very different beast. The developers took their learnings (and presumably their profits) and built something grand. Everspace 2 shed the roguelike trappings and became an epic space RPG, something more akin to Freespace or even Diablo. It was fantastic to see.
I am writing all this not to discourage people from checking out these sorts of games. In fact, it is quite the opposite. Galactic Vault and the many, many other roguelikes out there are often the first steps, the beginnings of a development team, and they need your support. Now I am not saying go out and buy every game, but perhaps next sale or promotion, maybe pick one of these games up. There is a lot of fun to be had, but they just might not last in your memory for long after you put the controller down. But your purchase, your support, may mean that this humble start encourages the developers to move on to something bigger, better and unforgettable, and that is all I hope for in this industry. Just because something doesn’t stand out in a crowd doesn’t mean it is bad; it may mean that the crowd itself is very, very good and getting attention among excellence is that much harder. Galactic Vault and its kin are good games, they just don’t strike that unique chord that the excellent games do, hardly the biggest sin committed by a game now, is it?
Galactic Vault was covered with code kindly supplied by the publisher.
