Grumpy Gamer

Hi there! I’m Elissa, and I’m the other designer on Death by Scrolling and doing a guest post this week. It’s technically my second project with Ron now, and when I’m not designing my own Roguelike (Dungeons of Freeport), or other games such as Deck & Conn, I’m drinking coffee and fighting drop-bears here here in the sunbaked land of Australia. If you want to follow me on social media, I’m on Mastodon primarily at @vampiress@eigenmagic.net and on Bluesky sometimes at @elissablack.com

A confession to make. I started writing this blog post, got a ways in, and then realized there was a critical problem with it: almost nobody reading the post would have any idea just how Death by Scrolling actually plays, so it’d probably wash right on over them producing a painted-on polite smile.

So here I am, back at the start, suddenly finding myself giving the elevator pitch and basic game play description of the game. It’s also easier now that some game play footage as been released.

Death by Scrolling is a vertically scrolling action-roguelike game.

TesterTron3000 playing Death by Scrolling

You select one of several different characters and progress through increasingly long and densely populated levels full of villainous nasties, treasures, gold coins, traps, collectables, and simple puzzles. At the end of each level you get a brief moment of respite at a camp where you can pick up and buy powerups, take or turn in quests, and go make another tea in the kitchen before returning to your computer before venturing ever-further into the fantastical worlds of Purgatory.

At first glance, the game doesn’t look like a Roguelike. Even in the most loose definition of the term - it’s vertically scrolling and action-driven. If anything, it seems to have more in common with something like River Raid or 1942 than a dungeon crawler. But to me, where it starts to show its lineage is when it comes to do level design in the game.

In terms of my work on the project, I’m designing & writing the game with Ron, but probably the majority of my time is spent doing the level design. As such, I felt like that was a good place to start when writing a guest blog post - I could focus on one of the only things I actually do more than Ron on the game.

In the most superficial sense, the game’s levels are top-down 2d level prefabs designed in Tiled, a very useful open-source tile-based map editor, and stitched together at run-time by the game.

The individual pieces (we refer to them as prefabs) each have different bits of meta data attached to them such as their Land (or biome), what kind of prefab they are, what other prefabs they can attach to and what the probability is that they might appear, what mobs can spawn, etc.

For instance, a very simple, short bit of green grass with a small hill and some simple decorations might be pretty common, and appear regardless of what level you’re at, where-as a more complex prefab featuring a maze may be rare, limited to higher levels only, and might be flagged to only appear once in a level.

Using this metadata we can set it up so that early levels are shorter, simpler, and contain fewer ‘puzzle’ prefabs (what we call the more complex prefabs that have optional mazes, gates or enemy ambushes in them).

If a new player starts on the first level of a run (which is always in the grassy Land), the prefabs that get chosen to assemble the level are different to, say, the 15th level for a player who’s unlocked lots of upgrades and is currently in the Swamp land.

So, to create a single Land means designing the aesthetics, the enemies that occupy its levels, the basic gameplay style, and then, finally, a good hundred or more prefabs that make it up.

Doing those first bits isn’t easy, but it isn’t as time consuming as the weeks and months spent making up all the prefabs. This process usually has three steps.

First step: drinking coffee.

Second step: coming up with basic shapes and paths. This I tend to do in batches, doodling in a notepad or on my tablet, sometimes at a cafe, on a train, or really anywhere that isn’t my work desk (for a change).

With enough of these basic shapes figured out in varying levels of detail, it’s then time for-

Third step: spend days in Tiled, creating first at first the basic layouts, then adding more aesthetic detail.

I usually alternate between doing all three of these critical steps - a few hours in Tiled, then going for a walk to clear my head, get a coffee, and come up with some more prefab ideas.

It’s this design process that to me really drives home how much the game is a Roguelike (or is at least related to them - ask two fans of roguelikes what makes something a roguelike and you will get five different answers).

Just like designing most any other Rogue-adjacent game, it also means that staring at prefabs and their metadata until your eyes go square won’t truly tell if what you’ve built plays well. Great ideas on paper don’t always work. Or maybe they do, but with a few powerups they become too easy (or too hard).

In Tiled, shown above, we have data layers that exist along with aesthetic ones. Different data types (each a unique colour for easy recognition) can be painted on that layer to allow the prefab designer to, for instance, stop a player jumping onto that square, stop power-ups from randomly spawning there, or forcing a square to be non-passible.

Which means built into this prefab design cycle is also a crap-ton of testing. From almost the very start we’ve had regular QA and play-testing done at least a few hours a week. What puzzles are too hard when you’re moving at speed? What other forms end up being fun and should be put into more prefabs?

Even the simple act of adding more prefabs can unbalance the game if we aren’t careful. Add 20 more prefabs to a given Land, and suddenly those rare ones you made might occur less frequently than you’d like.

In the end, it’s meant that designing this game has been a massively cyclic process. Adding features, prefabs, or puzzles, tinkering with them, experimenting, and even removing some if they turn out to have been better left on that scrap of napkin at the cafe down the road from my place.