toffee the cat 💕 @toffy@raru.re

@toffy i would let her stab me

@mezzodrinker the roguelike combo of procgen + permadeath gives a game a high replayability factor but you lose a lot of control over the player's experience due to all the randomness, which makes the format ill-suited for telling heartfelt personal stories etc. Meanwhile making a game full of bespoke areas, characters, cutscenes etc. with the same longevity as a roguelike is a _lot_ more work.

So I guess what @toffy is saying is like, it'd be nice if more people would circumvent that whole conflict by just not caring about longevity, just make some really sweet 5-10 minute games that deliver a perfect hand-crafted experience without expecting the player to keep coming back.

That's not to say the games have to stick to older genres and established mechanics, if anything they have more freedom to explore design possibilities because there's less need to build up a whole content pipeline or framework like you'd have to do with a longer game or a procgen-based game.