Roguelike Rail Shooter (Paper Edition)

I built a very simple paper prototype to explore the concept of a rails shooter that gets generated on the fly.

The rules are simple: every node in the game is built out of a topology, gross motion, fine motion, transition, and one or more enemy presentations. I didn't even make unique enemies, by the way.

These can have slightly unique results/conditions.

So, for example, the first node in a random bit might be

TOPOLOGY: Large room full of shelves. High chance of enemies hiding in shelves.
GROSS MOTION: Run through and then turn around to face the enemies
FINE MOTION: Slow-motion opportunity
TRANSITION: Wall explodes (cannot leave room)
PRESENTING:
Wave 1: Dread enemies (corpses that get up)
Wave 2: Popup challenge (enemies that just pop up at close range)

As a result, this is what the player would experience with this node:

"Ah, it's a room full of shelves and corpses. We're sprinting through. Turning around and... oh, a slow-motion power up and the corpses are waking up! Ah, killed the zombies and AGH THERE'S ONE IN MY FACE! Okay, let's go through the doo- AGH THE WALL EXPLODED!"

Of course, this sort of very basic list system can't really reflect the difficulty of implementing this stuff actually happening in a 3D world in real time, but it does allow you to see how this stuff could be made to happen.

In this case, I rolled up about ten nodes, and after the wall explodes things go like this:

Still inside the shelving room. After the wall explodes, you turn and see the boss dropping a miniboss through the rubble. Fight!

You run to a maze of tight halls and circle through them until you kill the eight or so zombies within. Then you crawl into an air vent.

In the air vent, there's nothing. But peering out of the air vent is a cluster of enemies around an exploding barrel.

Jumping out of the air vent onto a straight stairwell, you first look down the staircase, then run down it. You're staring at the exit, but then you spin and look up the staircase - zombies are stumbling down it! Kill them! (Please note that "camera pointed uselessly at wall while enemies creep up from behind" is actually a fine motion event, not me interpreting an event to be like this.)

Through the door is the same shelving room you initially fled. You decide to stop and clear the room of the steady stream of zombies coming in from the broken wall. There is a quicktime event (shooting moving targets to avoid terrain damage is a common staple) where you dive through the broken wall

The medium-size windowed room through the broken wall has no enemies in it, but you can see enemies out of the window - and snipe at them, if you like. You pass through the door and seal it.

There's a large room with a small ramp on the other side. There's no enemies but, halfway through the room, there's a direction sting. Something like "Through there! We're getting close to the loading docks!" Then there's a sprint through a pack of slow, damaged enemies to crawl under a vertical door.

You end up in a hall packed with doors, and decide to clear it. A bystander is caught up, and you can rescue them by shooting a steady stream of incoming enemies and a miniboss. Unfortunately, the first door you try is locked.

You move around this large hall repeatedly, hopping around a bit, while shooting the various scattered zombies coming in through the doors. Then the boss arrives and carves away a big chunk of the level before winging off.

Still in the hall of doors, you stand your ground. There is a gore note as the boss drops a pack of corpses as it leaves. After falling wetly to the ground, the corpses stand up and attack, simultaneous with a few zombies coming in from another door. After killing them, you go through the damaged area...

This is the sort of progression you can easily get when you think of more than just map layout and enemies. Even with just generic enemies, you can see the framework for an interesting sequence.

However, the content required to build this is way out of my league, so I'll focus on maybe doing something similar on a much smaller scale.

Timelike Roguelikes

I was thinking about roguelikes. If you squint, you can think of every room in a roguelike as a scene. Sometimes the scene is not straightforward - you end up backing off, or running off to a closet for a moment, or falling in a pit and getting shunted somewhere else, or luring enemies out the room to fight them in a hallway...

But rooms are largely self-contained scenes.

So, I was thinking: can we create a timelike roguelike? Where the randomly created "rooms" are literally scenes?

Let's think in terms of a made-for-TV medical soap opera, such as House.

There are five fundamental kinds of scenes:

1) Surgery. This would be the direct skill challenge scene.

2) Bedside. This shows that the patient is a human, allowing the people to empathize. It also shows the patient's health and how fast they are getting better/worse (sometimes extremely rapidly).

3) Brainstorming. This is a scene where the doctors are grappling with the situation intellectually, a second kind of skill challenge that is also used to show that the doctors are very smart but grappling with very complicated situations. In soap operas, this sometimes involves breaking and entering.

4) Hall Blitz. This is where the doctors have figured things out at the last second, or are rushing to stop someone who thinks they've figured things out.

5) Personal Scene. While the personalities of the staff thread through every kind of scene, personal scenes show them outside of medical emergencies and allow us to empathize with them directly. Hospital politics and love affairs are the most common kinds of personal scene.

These five kinds of scenes can be arranged in more or less any order.

What if we think about a particular 'episode' (floor of a dungeon) as having a particular layout of scene sets. Basically, rooms and hallways of various sizes. As time passes, you move through the set, entering different scenes. If you leave a bedside scene for a brainstorming scene, and then move back into the bedside scene, that means you're returning to the same patient for more conversation and humanity reaffirmation. Two rooms, three actual scenes.

But a floor could easily have two or three different bedside scenes, each of which represents a different kind of bedside scene or a different patient. The shape of the scene is different.

We can think about the sort of challenges that would arise. For example, bedside scenes would be about gathering information and improving the patient's stats. Brainstorming scenes would convert information into stat buffs for the doctors. Personal scenes would allow the doctors to level up. Surgery allows you to do the best work, but rapidly drains the patient's stats. And so on.

But, of course, individual challenges arise like monsters in a roguelike. A hidden allergy, an obstructive doctor, a patient that sneaks alcohol in, a heart that just won't behave...

Like a roguelike, you can tackle them in the scenes they emerge... or retreat to a different scene, luring it along to tackle it in a setting of your choice. Bedside scene - patient shows sudden crash due to an allergy to new medication. You can treat it in a bedside scene using bedside scene tactics... or you can rush the patient into emergency treatment and deal with the reaction in a surgery scene, although that also debuffs the patient heavily. If it's not a fatal allergy, you can simply retreat back into a brainstorming scene and try to gain more stat buffs before tackling it again.

The whole time, you have a party of characters under your command, being characters, moving slowly through character arcs and leveling up. This is necessary to keep involvement high.

I was thinking... this kind of temporal roguelike could be a lot of fun. I used a medical drama because they have a pretty simple format, but the same basic idea could be used in a lot of ways. It's a strategy RPG that builds its own story.