Soul Survivor is an introductory level game to the rogue-like genre where players locate dungeons, explore them while fighting off against monsters, and acquirer the monster’s soul essence to transform into them to gain new powers to help progress deeper into the unknown.

Intent

We wanted to make a game that helped introduce players to the classic style of the rogue-like genre. This was mainly brought up due to the recent upsurge of rogue-lite games that treat the genre as more of a an add on to other genres like Dead Cells and Enter The Gungeon rather than the rewarding strategy game of luck that it is.

Design Philosophy

For this project, the main pillars that we focused on are simplicity, accessibility, and variety. The two main limiters of this genre is the overbearing amount of information not given to the player or having it but needing to travel through menus upon menus for it (as seen below). Where as the main draw of this genre is the vast amount of different ways to play each time you pick it up.

Simplicity

With knowing that we wanted to keep true to the genre while still changing it to make things simpler for the player. We used the QA service provided by Champlain College to help make decisions on how to display information and how to play the game. Just some of the great results we got were what kind of movement style that should be used for the most comfort and the idea of having menus that are adjustable to provide info when needed

Accessibility

Even though the QA service provided great information from the player’s perspective, it was soon apparent that the information had some bias due to most of the testers having their own ways of interpreting the rogue-like genre as well as being able to infer about game mechanics from their experience in other games. In order to truly see that we were making a game that was accessible to peoples that aren’t as families with games in general.

These personal one on one testings were more focused on seeing if players that where unfamiliar with games in general(not just rogue-likes) are able to understand and play effectively. With this kind of personal testing, we found that the game provided a sense of ease through the art style of curved lines and simple shapes. As well as, the slow pace allowing for time to get use to everything with out feeling like they are being rushed.

Variety

The main aspect that we carried over from other rogue-likes is the idea of having a vast amount of interaction between everything the player can do. From the random generating tiles set for each floor to the ability to change your class on the fly by collecting enemies soul essence. This aspect was the hardest to support due to the college setting of having to put focus into other classes as well as the severe rapid nature of prototyping features that then requires fixing due to bugs. The project ended as a team decision due to feelings that it was not up to the standard of Champlain College, but still being happy where the projected ended up.