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[Kyzrati]

It's okay, by then they've paid anyway . I'll just have to seek out a new batch for the sequel!

Seriously though, it's all about overcoming nasty new challenges--that nastier the challenge you've overcome, the better you feel about it! This has always been an interesting tradeoff with permadeath games in general (not that a Thief is going to kill anyone--they don't even have weapons!).

[JobLeonard]

Thief won't kill anyone, but with a name like that I bet they'll get players killed by stealing That One Item That Would Have Saved Them at the wrong time

[Kyzrati]

Well they can only take things that you have equipped, so you could also hide your good stuff in your inventory if you see them coming (or just try to shoot them ). Come to think of it... I'm not sure what a Thief will do if their intended target doesn't actually have any components attached. (Not that it's a common state to be in--most targets will have something, even if only a leg... *Thief steals your last remaining leg*, ha!)

[JobLeonard]

Can you uh... test and make sure it doesn't crash the game?

[Kyzrati]

Don't worry it won't crash the game. What'll probably happen is they'll keep trying to steal from you until you do attach something they can take. (So in theory going naked would be one way to deal with them, but that would leave you vulnerable to anything else that comes along, not to mention you'd have to leave stuff behind!)

(But yeah I'll probably want to look into it if only so that they don't appear really stupid in this situation!)

[Kyzrati]

Cogmind got featured in a 2-page article in PC Guru magazine (Hungary). The editor said it's one of the best early access games they previewed in 2016

They also have sidebars for DF, NetHack, and URR! Pretty cool to be mentioned alongside other greats.

[JobLeonard]

 

[Kyzrati]

Pricing a Roguelike
[Cross-posted from the devblog here--follow link for better formatting and light-on-dark style.]

Price, funding, revenue, development costs... these are not terms traditionally associated with roguelikes. The situation has changed significantly over the past several years, though. Not only are there many more roguelikes these days, but some of them (*gasp*) even cost real money!

Having made the leap from years of hobbydev to years of commercial roguelikedev, I have some thoughts and experiences to share on the somewhat contentious idea of raising money for a roguelike, and pricing strategies in general. Although I write in terms of roguelikes, most of the same principles can be applied to other genres as well.

In short, Cogmind's approach to pricing has worked out perfectly, initially meeting my expectations, and then before long exceeded them. Repeatedly.


Why Pay for a Roguelike?
Before I get into examples, the short answer is that money makes more things possible. Who doesn't want even more higher quality games from their favorite genre?

As for specifically what money can do for roguelikes, not too long ago on the Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead forum a relevant thread[/url] popped up.

Excerpts from a discussion on C:DDA UI development.

You see this a lot in roguelike development, where accessibility and UI features are an afterthought. That's not to say they aren't important, nor would many developers make such a claim, but it is widely considered a less enjoyable part of creating a roguelike. Roguelikes are all about adding new mechanics and content--heck, rapid feature development is one of ASCII's strong suits to begin with! UI work requires yet more time (on top of all the other things RL dev entails) in a very different area of expertise.

Kevin (C:DDA developer) at the end there makes the point well: Hobby projects are more about what the dev wants to do. I can say from experience that after having switched from hobby to commercial development, the focus shifts towards a lot of what the dev should/must do. Sure there's still the fun stuff--the new mechanics, new map generators, finding new and exciting ways to killchallenge players... but I also spend plenty of time doing things I don't necessarily feel like doing.

You know, like most any other job that pays

A developer charging money for a game has an obligation to serve the player wherever possible, and that means devoting proper attention and resources to usability. Note that this in no way implies sacrificing creative control, it just means treating the project as a proper business--taking feedback, interacting with players (who double as customers), and providing customer service. As such, accessibility features have a much higher priority for me, which a lot of players appreciate.

Players get so much more than that, though. Increased production value and quality make up the bulk of obvious benefits from paid roguelikes. Being able to invest extra time or money means:

• Extensive professional tilesets of a consistent quality and style. ADOM currently has over 6,000 tiles; ToME4 has a mind-boggling total north of 20,000; Caves of Qud has upwards of 5,000; Cogmind has 1,165 (plus over a hundred custom font bitmaps, a thousand pieces of ASCII art, and many hundreds of procedural animations). And because they're all in development, these totals are still increasing as time goes by! (It's early yet for DoomRL successor Jupiter Hell, but with all those 3D assets it's in a league of its own and certainly not happening without funding! (already acquired through KS))
• Sound effects aren't something that a lot of roguelikes do--that's mostly roguelite territory, but Cogmind has made it a big part of the experience with over a thousand samples and counting (far more than any other roguelike and most other indie games).
• Music. Some roguelikes do this, too! (Still to write: my own article on that topic.)

Certainly plenty of perfectly good roguelikes have none of these things, but many of the more widely popular ones do, not to mention the potentially long stretches with no fixes for bugs reported in non-commercial roguelikes.

Optional elements aside, considering the time-intensive nature of roguelike development, simply having more time to dedicate to new features is a big thing. A revenue stream enables continuous development, much more desirable than the sporadic updates endemic to hobbyist gamedev (for which the ARRP was a somewhat successful attempt to remedy, but still can't compare to directly funding the process!).

Development on Ultima Ratio Regum, an amazing free roguelike project started in 2011 but only about half done by now, was unexpectedly halted for some months shortly before a planned release last year. Mark is now back at it again, but a number of other roguelikes have died or faded out over the years before reaching completion. Pure hobby projects tend to progress more slowly, and therefore stand a greater and greater chance of dying as time goes on. It's just a fact of life, in which any number of causes can spell the end of (or at least interrupt) development, be it family, studies, work, a change of interests, or "a bigger better idea!!1" . From that perspective, means to accelerate progress are a good thing (and of course for their part players won't complain about access to more timely updates!).

Honestly it's a huge amount of pressure to keep up that near-nonstop progress, but the ability to (relatively speaking) quickly and efficiently put together a world that others can enjoy is worth it.

Cogmind cumulative development hours, 2013.6-2017.1.

As an experiment, let's look at the hours I've put into Cogmind as of this writing (6,623) in a different light: What if this were a hobby project done in my spare time? Excluding basic needs and all other responsibilities, based on years of data I generally have about 50 hours to spare each week for work (all of which currently goes towards Cogmind). Assuming I use up 40 of that for a different job and develop purely as a hobby instead, and also making the big assumption that doing this other job wouldn't leave me even more exhausted and desiring extra time to relax and get away from brain-draining activities (it would), that leaves 10 hours per week... 6,623 h / 10 h/wk=662.3 weeks, or 12.7 years!

So rather than Cogmind being what it is today in January 2017, having started as a hobby back at the original date of June 2013 it would not reach its current state until July 2025. Sure we could chop off a year or two because, yes, I might spend vacation time working as well (though we'd also have to cut out the occasional weeks where I'd be too busy with other life stuff)--anyway, it's a generalization, but no matter how you look at it that's still terribly slow.

Then of course there's the fact that it's not done yet . I can say for sure that including post-1.0 work it'll easily top 8,000 hours (beyond that I don't really know).

In the end, most roguelikes and features are technically possible without any funding whatsoever, but it's going to take a lot longer (which, again, increases the chance of failure), or a lot of manpower (DCSS is a good, if rare, example there).


Why $30? Balancing Price with Other Factors
Although as I write this alpha access is available for $25, in 2015 Cogmind was introduced at $30, the price at which it remained for the entire first year of public alpha. As you would expect, reactions to this number ran the entire spectrum from "for an alpha?!?!?" to "totally happy to pay that!"

I based the specific number on a couple data points, first and foremost what I'd noticed from video game Kickstarter campaigns, that early access as a "perk" often came with tiers upwards of $30. Even outside KS, I found games like RimWorld, similarly a highly-replayable game under long-term alpha development at a good pace by a very active dev, which priced its alpha access at $30.

Overall it felt like a plausible range was somewhere around $20-$30. I would definitely not claim this approach is good for maximizing revenue potential, or even maximizing players while still bringing in "sufficient" revenue, but that wasn't the goal!

Graph demonstrating the concept of elastic demand (source). Video game demand is pretty darned elastic!

It's fairly obvious that a lower price point might very well outsell the current sales model in terms of total revenue, but to me there are more important factors than money to consider in the short term. The point of alpha funding is to keep development humming along until 1.0, before which too many players actually becomes a problem!

While not necessarily true of all devs, I believe in the importance of being active in the community, responding to everyone with a concern, question, or some other need of support, while also putting effort into making resources, extensive progress updates, and other information available outside the game. This requires a significant time investment, the effects of which are even more pronounced as a lone developer where talking to players means I'm not making real progress on the game itself.

Lower prices naturally attract more players, which given this community-oriented model will inevitably slow development as more and more time is spent on community management. But I love having the opportunity to maintain closer relations with a smaller player base, even adding custom options at the request of a single player, while still having plenty of time to work on the next release. So in this regard a higher price is beneficial for both development and the ongoing alpha player experience.

Game development is also incredibly risky, so it's nice to use any knowns to mitigate elements of risk wherever possible. This, too, played a role in the original pricing decisions, which you can see below from my general thought process:

• I do know that I have an established fan base who would be willing to pay more for a quality roguelike with quality continuous development and support.
• I don't know whether lowering the price to something more common across the entire indie market (like <=$10) would be able to attract enough players to even make up the difference. But I do know that even if it could, having 2-3 times as many players would be a larger burden on the process and unnecessarily slow development. The resulting "high noise-to-signal ratio" also makes it harder to focus on the best design decisions.
• Niche games, especially those with something truly unique to offer, can afford to charge more, and in many cases must charge more in order to be at all sustainable. Long-term sustainability is quite important to me, since this isn't a one-off thing and I hope to not only develop it further beyond 1.0, but also work on other games as well. It's (hopefully) a permanent job.

In that light, a $30 price point seemed the much safer route.

From a purely economic standpoint, where time is not a limiting factor (i.e. development and support can and will continue for quite a while), setting a higher price is also just smart business. Eldiran over on /r/gamedev (where especially when starting out I read a lot of first-hand industry info that was very helpful) put it very well in response to a question about how discounts damage indie sales:

Different players value your game differently. Hardcore fans want to buy it as soon as possible at full price. Some genre fans might be willing to grab it once it hits 10-20% off. People who are only mildly interested might wait for a 50% sale. And so on.

If you set up a 50% sale early on, all of those groups will buy it for 50%. That means you lost all the extra money you could have gotten from the 10% group, the 30% group, etc.

There are lots of other considerations. Consider what it looks like as a buyer to see a game go 50% or 75% off shortly after release. That would look like the developer isn't confident in the quality of their game. Maybe they're just trying make a quick buck with manipulative sales, and the game sucks?

That said, there are situations where getting a big playerbase as fast as possible is more important, such as for multiplayer-only games. Then it might be worth it to do sales early and often.

The comment is in reference to sales, but the same principles apply to pre-release pricing as well.

It's not purely a numbers game, though--the price is still very much associated with potential value. Subjectively speaking, I consider Cogmind worth that price if I were a player looking at such a game, and clearly many others agree. Everyone else can make that call for themselves based on the large amounts of information available, while a higher price serves a useful secondary purpose here: prevent impulse buys. Impulse buys, which are where a lot of developers can expect to bring in more players via low prices and steep discounts, are also where a lot of the noise-to-signal problems mentioned earlier come from. It leads to too many distracting, non-constructive comments from players who probably haven't spent very long with the game in the first place. (Not to say first impressions aren't important, too, but they shouldn't make up the bulk of the discussion.)

Side note: A great tool for games with a higher alpha price is a one-time mailing list for those who wish to be notified when the game comes down to its regular price. Over 1,000 people have signed up for that already. This is essentially akin to the Steam wishlist, albeit without the Steam part

A pricing discussion wouldn't be complete without a look at the common argument for a lower price before full release: Players may very well be playing an unfinished, buggy version that's not necessarily all that much fun, where a higher price equates to paying a premium to help find and report bugs! (That sounds like work...) I completely agree with that argument, though I would also argue that developers need to try to release early versions that are not so buggy, and fun from the start. Then it suddenly becomes more of a privilege to join the alpha process, where those players are not only having fun, but can also influence the future direction of the game via their feedback.

This is how I handled Cogmind--sure there have been bugs, but a relatively tiny number, nor is it usually anything serious (most serious bugs are discovered via automated testing prior to updates, and those which aren't are patched immediately, generally within an hour of reporting). Fixing bugs is always a top priority, and even the original 7DRL is fun so that aspect is covered, hence the overall player consensus that "it doesn't feel like an alpha," which is exactly the kind of sentiment that is important to lay the foundation for by building a quality pre-alpha in the first place.

Yet another advantage of a higher alpha price is a factor many non-developers may not realize: while in early access and not on Steam I can devote a lot more of the revenue to actual development, whereas on Steam a majority of the funds would go to Valve (30% fee) and the US government (taxes...), and they're certainly not going to help make Cogmind better! So each individual person supporting my work at this stage has been far more valuable to the project than even a handful of supporters on Steam could be, and the results are amplified with a higher price, all while keeping the player base to a manageable size. (Clarification: Steam is definitely a valuable channel in the long term, as it provides access to a much larger pool of players--so many only buy through Steam!--but given the context it's not the right choice for me at this time. That said, in the interest of sustainability the amount of post-1.0 work will be mostly contingent on how successful Cogmind is on Steam.)

(continued in the following post...)

[Kyzrati]

(...continued from the previous post)

Getting Results
Cogmind Alpha Access has been quite successful, my definition being that it's been able to fund itself. And that's with just the right amount of feedback from players to help improve the design without causing too much of a drag on the process.

Revenue has been both relatively steady and just enough to keep development going. In fact, the process has been going so smoothly that the original plan to "finish" by the end of 2015 was quickly scrapped in favor of another year of developing extra features, which became yet another year of decent revenue that pushed the intended deadline into 2017. Sure, development could've been rushed to the planned 1.0 over a year ago, but there were/are so many tempting optional features, and many new players have come to support this project, so why not add more fun stuff? :D (For the curious, a sampling of the features so far that could only be added as a result of strong alpha support: traps, Trojans, Waste, garrisons, Zionite plot line, about 15% of the items, numerous additional robot designs, countless extra UI features, large-scale refinement of mechanics like hacking, machines, and flight...)

Since Cogmind was available at more than one price when alpha access began (an idea inherited from Kickstarter but without the temporary campaign nature), let's look at the reasoning and performance of each of the tiers.

• $90. While as a sum this highest tier seems expensive, it included multiple keys at essentially $22 each, or $15 if you subtract the value of the t-shirt thrown in. This whole tier was just something I wanted to do because having a custom t-shirt is neat, and 18 other people liked the idea, too (only available during the first month, though since then there have been numerous requests to bring back the t-shirt, so I've been taking names and will do that at some point).
• $60. I can't take credit for this idea, which turned out to be a really nice one indirectly suggested by sambojin over on the Bay 12 forums, who shortly before launch said he hoped for a way to buy more than one key, preferably at a discount, to give the others away. That sounded like a perfectly reasonable request, thus the Improved Tier was born and to this day 9.7% of all revenue falls into this tier. And it's not only for gifting, either, as multiple supporters can pool their money and buy this 3-pack which breaks down to $20 each. Especially soon after the launch period it was possible to see such groups forming on various forums among friends. There are multiple advantages here, including a bit of free marketing while also giving those who couldn't afford $30 a way to acquire it at a 33% discount. I also made sure to clearly indicate that $20 is the intended launch price for 1.0 (it always has been). Managing expectations is an important part of pricing!
• $30. This one was already covered pretty well. It accounts for 85.6% of revenue in the first year, before the next tier was introduced.
• $25. When the first anniversary of Alpha Access rolled around (May 2016), sales seemed to be in an ever-so-gradual decline, thus it was a perfect opportunity to introduce the first price drop. It was nice to have that middle-ground leeway in between what it was and the future launch price, enough to make a difference to buyers but still be a respectable amount of revenue without opening the flood gates to new players. As expected, sales picked up again, and have continued at a good pace ever since.
• $20? More recently I've taken to offering the occasional 20% discount coupon in coordination with other events. These are neat since I can see precisely how much a lower price stimulates real buying interest coming from various sources by using different coupon codes for each.

Summary of Cogmind Alpha Access Tiers, 2016.

Note that even in introducing the $25 tier, I did not remove the $30 tier. It's still available as it offers a few perks that don't come with the new lowest tier, just a thank you in the credits and a forum badge. And despite the availability of $25 access, some people still go for $30! From May 19, 2016, to date, the $30 tier still accounted for 14.1% of individual sales (15.9% of revenue). Had the same group of people instead only had the $25 option, gross revenue would have simply been $795 less. Not providing ways for individuals to offer extra support when they have both the means and desire is so-called "leaving money on the table." And when I see that during alpha dev it means "leaving features on the table, too"

Cogmind Monthly Revenue (Gross), 2015.9 - 2016.12 (graph excludes initial 4-month period after first release due to distortion by outside factors)

While there are too many factors involved to draw sweeping conclusions, it's probably safe to say that lowering the price in May didn't hurt the bottom line. Compared to the period before, when the lowest price was $30, average monthly revenue rose 13.9% from $2,478 to to $2,823. The latter average excludes October, which was a weird month because it was Cogmind's largest-ever update combined with a little surprise article from RPS. In fact, October, November, and January were three consecutive "largest ever" releases (January's not quite done so I couldn't include that data, but it looks like it could break $4k alone).

Actually, we can do better than this with a comparison of averages from just the few months before and after May. February through April (plus the first half of May) sales were showing clear signs of flagging (monthly average: $1,927), while in the four and a half months after adding the new tier (through September, before things started getting crazier) the average increased 45.3% to $2,799. Looking at it that way, the change had a larger impact than I'd realized! A more detailed look at the difference between the 15 days before and after May 19th is equally telling:

Cogmind Daily Revenue, May 5 - June 5 (2016)

During the months leading into early May I was getting kinda worried because I'd definitely have to wrap up development more quickly if that trend kept up (see those two zero days?! Scary!). But the new price put alpha back on a healthier long-term feature-filled schedule. The one-year anniversary turned out to be an excellent opportunity used well.

Changing Times
Indie devs in general tend to undervalue their games, though it's nice to see that a growing number of devs aren't afraid to charge a (minimally) decent price for paid roguelikes. Caves of Qud is only $9.99 for early access, but will reportedly rise to $14.99 at full release; both Ancient Domains of Mystery and Dungeonmans are $14.99; Jupiter Hell is aiming for $30-ish... It's necessary if we want this quality and pace to be sustainable.

Those graphs and numbers look pretty, but they're not much compared to the amount of hours and money that I put into development, or what I can make in another line of work (it's also gross revenue, not net!). Other devs are in similar situations. The genre is relatively niche, after all, and based on publicly available Steam data the above released games only have somewhere around 20-25k players each, so it's been heartening to see the core community repeatedly coming out in support of paid roguelikes over the past couple years.

Roguelikes especially, with near infinite replayability and near endless development cycles (those games have been putting out updates for years), are just the kind of high value-to-cost ratio games that both warrant and can benefit from higher prices in the long-term.

As for my own future plans for Cogmind pricing, 1.0 will be released at $19.99, with no plans to do any significant sales for a long while as I continue updating with extra features (I hear this echoed by several other devs as well). Of course once on Steam, players in certain regions will have access to lower regional prices. Steam changes a lot of things by introducing its own many variables, so it was interesting to be able to take this somewhat more "pure" look at revenue and pricing data before it gets that much more exposure.


Good Luck
To the devs reading this, do remember that every genregame is different, and there are other very different yet equally successful models out there, too. Dwarf Fortress, UnReal World, and Tales of Maj-Eyal, for example, are all widely-popular free roguelikes that exist on purely donation-based systems (with full-time devs!), or offer some extra perks to supporters. My pricing decisions came out of what I felt could work for Cogmind based on lots of research and also consideration of my personal circumstances and experiences.

Oh, and I'm sure there's gotta be some luck in there, too

[Jabberwocky]

Interesting writeup.  Haha, it's funny, only game devs would understand how much mental torture effort goes into pricing a game.  I guess especially so for an ascii(ish) roguelike, which many fans are used to being free, and don't quite understand the amount of work that goes into a game like this.  If anyone wants to complain, they should be forced to read every page of this dev log first.  

Indie devs in general tend to undervalue their games, though it's nice to see that a growing number of devs aren't afraid to charge a (minimally) decent price for paid roguelikes

Well said.

[Kyzrati]

Absolutely, there are so many tough challenges in making a game, and then setting the "wrong" price in the end can make all that hard work for naught!

I do hope that others will point to my article in reference to the value of paying for games and a general idea of what it really takes to make one, although honestly I also think that at least the core indie audience already gets it, with most willing and happy to pay what even devs can consider semi-reasonable prices. A lot of roguelike players specifically need some convincing, though (given the genre's history), or at least a very compelling reason to pay, which I've been trying to create

But a big part of this post was aimed at devs looking for more ideas and food for thought!

[Kyzrati]

Implemented difficulty modes! I'll talk more about the details in the next blog post.

Not much I can really show for this except the new leaderboard system, upgraded to support separate boards for each (more complicated than it sounds, because the same player can't appear on more than one board, and the global stats have to split up players for some purposes but not others).

[Kyzrati]

While on the issue of difficulty, I also went ahead and put in a framework to support "challenge modes," options the player can select to change some mechanics and creating a new type of experience, generally increasing the difficulty for extra points. There could be a lot more options in the future, but for now there's only one, a special mode I've been wanting to add for a while because it's relatively easy but can lead to very interesting games: Unstable Evolution. The player can no longer choose what slots to evolve--they are selected at random!

Random slots chosen due to UNSTABLE status shown in the log (for QoL purposes the slots message is now also shown even when the player chooses them):


Examples of random slot evolution from beginning to end:

The first there actually looks to be a fairly normal composition, although of course the order could be odd--not evolving what the player needs when they need it, forcing them to adapt; the second is kinda crazy due to that large number of power slots! This should lead to some interesting runs, and enable more types of replayability.

Active challenges listed in score sheet:


Applied challenges listed in score history, along with easy mode indicator:

[Kyzrati]

Been super busy finishing an entire new map this week, and with it a dozen new items (several with new mechanics)...

Some of the new art!


A new super high-density scanner at work:




Also added a new challenge mode: "Scavenger," wherein there are no stockpiles in the main complex, all lone item drops are damaged, and anything else must be salvaged from robots or stolen from haulers. An example of the kind of crap the player gets in this mode


Still need to get around to finishing that new post detailing the difficulty modes...

[Kyzrati]

As you've probably heard by now, Valve will be getting rid of Greenlight to replace it with... something, and rather than wait for all the details on that something, I've decided to go ahead and push Cogmind through Greenlight while it still exists.

After nearly four years of full-time progress, today I pushed the button: Cogmind on Greenlight!

Any votes or help spreading the word are appreciated. Nearly four years of full-time development have finally brought my first commercial project to this point o_O

For the "branding image" required by Greenlight I put together a fun composite gif showing an assortment of features:


Progress-wise everything has been smooth--the new map for Alpha 14 and all its mechanics/bots/items/events are now complete. The sudden Greenlight campaign will certainly delay the next update by a bit, but I still plan to release it this month. (hm, this is an awfully short month )

[Kyzrati]

Adjustable Difficulty
[Cross-posted from the devblog here--follow link for better formatting and light-on-dark style.]

Roguelikes are notoriously difficult. In this way they're really no different from games of old, across numerous genres, which many players were far from guaranteed of completing. It's only today that roguelikes have become more uniquely associated with difficulty because the market around them has changed so much!

There will always be an additional layer of inherent challenge to a game with content that changes from play to play, but while traditional roguelikes and their players continue to embrace that challenge, the wider games market has shifted along with player expectations. In short, as gaming has exploded to include a much larger group of consumers, consumers with different needs and capabilities, developers have sought to take those circumstances into account. (There is even a portion of players that believe they deserve access to every part of a game, as content they paid for!) Therefore these days it's common practice for games to include multiple difficulty levels, with pressure to embrace such options as just another form of accessibility. This is especially true with respect to commercial games, which are reliant on sales to survive--more accessible games simply means more sales!

Being free, and niche, roguelikes have always been somewhat insulated from this trend--very few offer difficulty settings, not to mention the nature of their design and common mechanics (e.g. permadeath) make following that trend somewhat less meaningful. In some ways the point of a roguelike is to offer as many challenges as possible, and as long as it is theoretically possible to overcome those challenges then no one's to complain, right?

That said, it's probably not a coincidence that two widely popular roguelikes also offer multiple difficulties.

Tales of Maj'Eyal has five separate difficulty settings, one below normal and three above. From the creator, DarkGod:

"Difficulties were first added like six years ago or so. As for why, well first because I can! I made the engine robust enough that I can do them very easily. And most importantly because not all players have the same skill. I for once barely manage to win on normal with my preferred class while others find normal to be braindead. My goal has always been to give fun to as many people as possible and that follows along. Also to note that my difficulty levels are not simple number bumps (there are those too obviously), each level introduces new harder mechanics (like random bosses, being constantly hunted, ...). To be fair I do not understand why devs do NOT put difficulty levels in their games heh "

DoomRL also has five separate settings, distributed in the same way. From the creator, Kornel Kisielewicz:

"It raises the replayability of the game, allowing you to go more difficult once you feel that the game is getting to easy. Initially it was added just as a tribute to Doom, but it turned out to be a great feature, so I gave it a lot more thought later on."

Interestingly, both developers emphasize settings as a way to increase the challenge level, an approach also reflected by the available options, wherein the default is towards the lower end of the scale.

ADOM also added more gameplay settings in recent years, some of which have an effect on difficulty.

Whether or not to implement difficulty levels, and the best approach to take, comes down to a question of who we're balancing the game for, and what do we hope those players can experience? As a hardcore fan of roguelikes, I've always enjoyed that winning is not inevitable for everyone, even given years of play and practice. The thrill and excitement at each new degree of personal achievement has always felt like an integral part of the roguelike experience, and if "content" is attainable without a high level of skill then that experience is watered down.

Outside the roguelike realm I've noticed a trend of games stating up front that they are very challenging and aimed at the hardcore audience, which at least puts players in the right mindset from the beginning, asking themselves "hm, it's meant to be hard--can I take this challenge?" before even starting. This trend became most apparent following the success of Dark Souls, interesting because the same mindset used to be simply assumed back when gaming was more niche: If you weren't good enough, you may very well not see the whole game. That is certainly one option, to just make it clear that "the game is tough, good luck!" I would argue that if areas of the game most players can generally reach are still fun (and they should be!) and fully satisfying (that one's a bit harder...) that's the most important part, but times have changed. And expectations with them.

I've softened my own position on the matter as well, especially in the 21 months since releasing the first Cogmind alpha and listening to feedback from the community. I can now more clearly see the benefits of adding difficulty settings to a roguelike. But first, a little look at the drawbacks!


Drawbacks?
If there weren't any negatives to allowing adjustable difficulty, lots more roguelikes would have them, right?

For brevity's sake I'll use a list:

• Trivializing some aspects of the game by using an easier setting potentially results in a less rewarding long-term experience (mentioned before). While it's possible to take on higher settings later, the player has already lost half of the reward: the initial discovery aspects associated with that achievement (e.g. what comes after).
• Using easier difficulty modes may teach bad habits, or at least not teach good ones. Players using easier settings as a crutch are less frequently forced to improvise effective solutions to challenges. This is fine for those players who don't want to improve, but might hinder others looking to learn the skills necessary to tackle at least the default mode.
  
• Even though roguelikes are single-player games, multiple difficulty modes somewhat fragment the community. "You reached where?!" and "You did what?!" etc. no longer have quite the same meaning once there are easier difficulties at which the same content is available. Essentially not everyone is playing the same game anymore, and progress is no longer quite so instantly comparable. To me this is one of the bigger drawbacks, though it can at least be mitigated with a sufficiently large community in which there are plenty of players at each tier.

I don't believe that any of these are conscious reasons behind the relative lack of difficulty settings in roguelikes, though. When it comes to development effort, game design and balance are delicate things, and making changes to systems to accommodate difficulty levels can have negative consequences for the overall experience. It's not just about difficulty, as the whole "feel" can change as a result. Adjusting certain aspects of a mechanic could have a cascade of unbalancing effects on others, especially in roguelike worlds featuring grand scope and numerous interconnected systems. Not that this can't be overcome, it just takes longer to get right. And dev time spent accommodating different player needs is unfortunately very much not in the roguelike tradition. (Further compounding the issue is the fact that roguelikes often continue to evolve and are never quite complete--changes and new features have to take into account the potential effects across multiple difficulty settings, and creating a roguelike already requires so much work to begin with! If anything, at least the fuzziness of the RNG can help soften some of the impact of working across multiple difficulties.)

Anyway, while I didn't go into details there are pretty strong arguments against most of what I've written above with regard to drawbacks, so... yeah


But Benefits!
The benefits of difficulty settings are more straightforward:

• It's nice to be able to cater to different types of players (especially as a single-player game where we don't have to concern ourselves with multiplayer balance issues). We do it with UI options, so why not with difficulty?
• Some players learn better in a low-pressure environment, at least when it comes to basics.

Straight from Cogmind's new manual section on Difficulty:

"By default Cogmind has been carefully balanced to provide a fun yet challenging roguelike experience that can be reliably overcome given sufficient experience and skill. That said, some players simply don't have the time or inclination to strive for mastery, thus alternative modes are available that tweak multiple aspects of the game to make survival somewhat easier."

About that difficulty...

Hence the number on reason difficulty settings are important: People have less time in general these days as the pace of life has picked up, and there are so many more games than there used to be. On average, players used to acquire new games less frequently, and play the same ones longer, which also meant it was more likely to reach those difficult areas as skill improved over time. (The average gamer was also a lot younger with more free time )


The Baseline
Notice that most of what I've discussed so far is in terms of easier difficulties. This is due to how I'm approaching the whole idea of these settings.

I believe that the default mode itself should be quite challenging, even for experienced players. In that sense Cogmind is different from other roguelikes such as DCSS or ADOM, where once players are familiar enough with the mechanics, content, and strategies, beyond the early game a new run is often just a case of going through the motions to win. Instead, difficulty should ramp up towards the end, not down. (This in itself is a topic I want to cover in more detail in a future article.)

And regarding the distribution of player skill--or rather visualized as which sections of the game different players are likely capable of reaching, I feel a bell curve is appropriate:

Cogmind player skill distribution: This is an idealized curve, though the actual curve based on reported score data actually looks more or less like this.

Thus assuming the normal difficulty, probably half of players will likely struggle to best the mid-game. While that's the end result, the true target of (most) well-designed roguelikes should be focused on being winnable nearly 100% of the time by an experienced and skilled player. Remember this does not equate with everyone actually being able to win--some people have gone decades playing, and enjoying, the same roguelike without ever actually winning!

Still, I've decided that we need these settings so let's get into the details of what that actually means.


"Easier Modes"
Cogmind has three difficulty settings: the default, an easier mode, and an even easier mode. I prefer to call them "easier" modes as opposed to "easy" because they are purely relative to the default difficulty, and may very well still be difficult for certain players! (I admit this is somewhat pedantic given everyone's clear understanding of video game difficulties )

Setting Cogmind's difficulty in the options menu.

The mode can be changed via the options menu, and does not take effect until the next run. I.e. switching to another difficulty mid-run is not allowed. This is for score sheet consistency, so it's possible to clearly define a run as belonging to one mode or another. Because obviously we'll want to keep runs separate on the new leaderboards:

Leaderboards 2.0 testing, divided by difficulty setting.

Players appear only on the board of the mode for which they most recently submitted a run (older runs are of course remembered for those who switch back and forth). It will be pretty interesting to see what kind of distribution we end up with starting with the next release!

As for the meaning of these modes, adjustments go beyond simple changes in number values, because numbers alone wouldn't be enough to make the game easier while retaining some semblance of balance and fun.

Easier Mode: The purpose of this mode is to retain most of the challenge and content of the default, still requiring a fair amount of experience and persistence to win, though not quite as demanding as the default mode. It is more for those who would still want to improve and hope to tackle the default mode later.

• 20% base resistance to all damage types
• +5% base accuracy (both ranged and melee)
• Effect of allies on alert level halved
• Disabling machines has less of an impact on alert level
• Traveling to a new area/map lowers alert level more than usual

As you can see, much of this is aimed at reducing the influence of alert level, which presents one of the larger long-term dangers to players who are frequently in combat. And the free damage reduction will somewhat slow the rate of item attrition, the other major factor contributing to Cogmind's downfall.

Easiest Mode: This mode is quite easy, generally too easy, though yes it's still possible to lose, and especially certain areas of the world are going to be pretty dangerous! That said, it will be easier to avoid them with minimal experience since the destination of every exit is automatically known in advance. It basically suits those looking for pure entertainment or those without much free time.

• 35% base resistance to all damage types
• +5% base accuracy (both ranged and melee)
• Effect of allies on alert level cut to one-third
• Disabling machines has a much lower impact on alert level
• Traveling to a new area/map lowers alert level much more than usual
• Lower chance of random hostile encounters (most notably in mines/caves)
• Hostile branch encounters (e.g. in caves/mines) cannot appear directly in spawn area
• -1 to all patrol squad sizes (stacks with garrison effect)
• -1 to number of garrisons per floor (cannot reduce to 0, however)
• Exit destinations automatically revealed on sight
• Evolve 1 extra slot on exiting scrapyard
• Scrapyard contains random useful utilities
• Items nearby your spawn in main complex maps replaced by random items more likely to be useful given your current state

All effects are subject to change, but as is there are too many variables and I'm not the target for these features (unlike the default mode!), so to determine how effective they are I'll have to rely on outside feedback from those who actually need and/or want these modes.

I've added a tutorial message that shows after the player's 5th death (if they are still using the default mode), to let them know there are easier modes if that's their thing.

For those already using other modes, I've added a number of indicators to help both themselves and other players distinguish the setting. First of all, score sheets are now clearly topped with a different header for each mode:

Score sheet headers by difficulty.

And to help players posting and looking at screenshots discern which mode is being used (it would get really annoying to have to say/ask every time!), the two primary views we'll see images of now also have highlight color changes to reflect the mode.

Game over screen, now in three variations.

HUD parts list, with a very subtle divider color change (to avoid having a significant impact on the aesthetics).

(continued in the next post...)

[Kyzrati]

(...continued from the previous post)

Hard Mode?
Interestingly, often times when I've brought up the idea of difficulty levels someone will ask if there will be harder modes. The fact that this is asked with regularity, despite many players barely being able to survive through the first half of the game, again reflects how valuable varying difficulty levels can be!

For the reason mentioned before--default roguelike mode should be hard--I don't currently plan to add an explicitly across-the-board harder mode. Instead I've taken other approaches to the idea of even more challenging options for experts.

Structurally speaking, the world already has more difficult optional routes and challenges built into it. Some of these are not even known to non-expert players, but are possibilities gradually discovered over time while uncovering more of the lore and NPC encounters. Some involve plot events, and others involve visiting certain areas in a certain order, taking advantage of the non-linear structure of the world to create a multitude of options. Even close to the surface, there are "extended end game" options for the brave or well-equipped.

On another level, strategy-wise winning with different builds also provides its own challenges (akin to wining other roguelikes with a different race or class), some of which are much more difficult than others.

Also falling under the "hard mode" end of the difficulty spectrum, as of the next release Cogmind includes a new framework for "Challenge Modes." In a sense, these are essentially what are called "conducts" in roguelike tradition, playing the base game albeit while applying some additional rule or rules. Here, however, they are formalized rather than player-enforced.

These rules are more interesting than outright making the game more difficult by changing numbers around, because all the latter suggests is that the player is aiming for highly efficient/optimized play (plus maybe some luck), whereas challenge modes actually fundamentally change the way the game is played! Much more interesting

So far I've implemented two such modes, mainly as a test, with many more to come, I'm sure. The first is named "Unstable Evolution," where you no longer have control over which slots you evolve--they are selected at random.

Random slots chosen due to UNSTABLE status shown in the log.

Examples of random slot evolution from beginning to end.

The first there actually looks to be a fairly normal composition, although of course the order could be odd--not evolving what you need when you need it, forcing you to adapt; the second is kinda crazy due to that large number of power slots! This mode should lead to some interesting runs, and enable more types of replayability. (Note that selection is weighted towards what players most often want--e.g. not a ton of power slots, so it's not necessarily that terrible, but you could get unlucky and have to deal with it... Adapt or die, such is evolution!)

The other new mode is named "Scavenger," wherein there are no part stockpiles and any solo randomly available items are damaged--everything else must be taken from other robots, or stolen from haulers! (Fabrication would be another option, but that has its own limits.)

A sample of the kind of junk one would find lying around the Factory in Scavenger mode.

You earn points for each challenge applied, and can pick more than one (unless one or more are for some reason incompatible with each other).

Active Challenge Modes listed in a section of the final score sheet.

Score History with a new column for difficulty and any active Challenge Modes appended to the end.

With only two modes, for now they are activated directly in the config file, but a new submenu will be added to the in-game options menu once there are enough of them to establish how that submenu will function. There is a forum thread where anyone can drop Challenge Mode suggestions/ideas that I can draw from later.

"Achievements" (as in Steam achievements, but I would want to implement them for non-Steam players as well) will also be a thing, and are similar in nature to difficulty modes, providing alternative goals that might be challenging or just fun. There's a forum thread to drop those, too :D

[Kyzrati]

Biggest feature of the past few days is going to give melee builds even more potential for awesome: Unlimited multi-wielding :D


Slice and dice...


Added some more melee-related utilities, too.


For balance purposes melee has always been limited to one attack at a time (but are incredibly powerful), unlike projectile weapons which can be fired in volleys. But players really like their multi-wielding, and I've found a way to add it that should make melee even more fun without being too powerful. Basically secondary melee weapons have a chance to carry out follow-up attacks after the main attack, so the randomness makes it somewhat unpredictable, though a determined melee player will still be able to build up some decent attack power...

[Zireael]

How many arms does the Cogmind have? 

[Kyzrati]

That's the cool thing, as many as you want to evolve! I bet with this new feature we'll start seeing bots with ten melee weapons running around chopping/smashing/shredding everything in sight... it'll be glorious until I maybe have to hit it with a nerf hammer (nah, probably not, but we'll see--fun for those who get in on it early anyway, heh)

And hey Zireael--didn't know you're on TIGS now