Something New is in the Works

It’s been a while since we’ve talked about our future plans, and today we wanted to unveil what we’ve been doing and what’s next for us in the short term. A while ago, shortly before the release of Duple Dragon, our team member Souren had an interesting thought: “Would Duple Dragon be even more fun if it were a roguelike?”

The idea was interesting, but deep in the final stages of releasing the game we were swamped with work and temporarily tabled the idea. Over the months since, though, we can’t get it out of our heads!

Screenshot of the 1980 videogame, Rogue, the namesake of the roguelike genre. Source: Wikipedia

We’re at a point where we feel so good about this roguelike idea that we’re seriously considering it may be the way Duple Dragon should have been all along. We decided some practical tests and prototyping was needed to reality check ourselves.

So far we’ve done what we’re internally calling a “pen and paper test”—despite the fact it didn’t involve any physical pens or papers—and the results were very promising. So promising that we’ll soon be moving on to recreating this prototype in the game itself.

Our Current Vision

In some respects, runners—the genre Duple Dragon falls under—are already close to roguelikes. They have procedurally generated levels where you try to get as far as you can without dying, and if you do, you have to retry from the start. This makes the shift of genre simpler than it might sound. While there are definitely a number of brand new systems we would need to create, much of our vision could be achieved by shuffling around how existing systems are presented.

Powers

 Stages

Stretch Goals

The above pieces are the core of the idea, and the part of it that shares the most similarity to existing systems in the game. We have many more things we’d like to add if we can, though, and we believe at least some of these will be necessary for the experience to be fresh and exciting on multiple playthroughs.

All of these goals are currently in the exploration phase. All of this can and likely will change in some way or may not be implemented at all! Welcome to game development. 😀

More Powers

The game currently has 11 powers available. This is not enough to create an exciting amount of randomness when choosing powers between stages. We already experienced this in our pen and paper test, and creating more powers would likely be a necessity if we continue with this experiment long term.

Bonus Stages

While choosing between multiple stages provides some variety already, we’d love to add even more. Bonus stages—small challenges that are different from normal gameplay—could prove this variety if they sometimes appeared between regular stages. These bonus stages would grant additional rewards if completed.

Upgrades

In addition to powers, which are limited to 3 equipped at a time, we want to add another type of reward we’re tentatively calling “Upgrades”. These would be passive bonuses with less effect than powers, but that you can have any number of at once. If you’ve played the excellent roguelike Slay the Spire, these would be similar to the Relics found in that game.

Our Next Steps

While this is all very exciting, there’s still a lot to do to make this experiment a reality. With the success of the pen and paper test, our next move is to prototype the same systems we faked in our test within the game itself. This would be things like selecting powers between stages, and going through a series of different stages each run instead of the weekly stages we have now.

Our goal with this experimentation process is to make sure the fun factor is there at each stage of prototyping, and to limit the scope of each prototype to the minimum possible to test the idea. There’s still the possibility the experiment will ultimately go nowhere, so we’re hedging our bets in case we need to abandon it entirely.

If things keep moving forward there will be many challenges to solve along the way. Some we can foresee, like how our rewards and monetization will need to shift to work with the new idea, but there will likely be even more that we can’t.

There’s also the question of what will happen to the current version of Duple Dragon. Should the roguelike be a separate game, or should it replace the current version? Should it stay on phones, or should we put it on PC? If we move to PC, what would creating a wide-screen version of the game entail?

Wrapping Up

Despite all of that uncertainty, we’re very excited to see where this idea goes. We hope you’ve enjoyed this peak behind the mask. If all goes well in our prototyping, there will definitely be opportunities to test this new version of the game coming up, so stay tuned for more information.

Thanks for reading; and for those in the United States, we hope you have a happy Thanksgiving!

–Caleb, Ian, and Souren