Loved reading this! As someone who's making a roguelite without combat it was good to be reminded about why combat is usually part of the recipe. When I saw your diagram about Player Health vs Enemy Health I felt compelled to write it out again for our game. I find it trickier to phrase in a context where the whole environment and gravity is your enemy (it's a climbing game).
That is exactly my experience as well, I actually started to dig in the topic because I was trying to figure out stuff on my (mostly) non-combat rogue-lite! I don't think enemies are mandatory, it's just the most common conflict but a "human vs nature" or even "human vs self" can work too imo.
The offense/defense axis is strong to create interesting progression dilemmas & give a feeling of depth (in all sorts of games actually) but there is a lot more to explore :)
Loved reading this! As someone who's making a roguelite without combat it was good to be reminded about why combat is usually part of the recipe. When I saw your diagram about Player Health vs Enemy Health I felt compelled to write it out again for our game. I find it trickier to phrase in a context where the whole environment and gravity is your enemy (it's a climbing game).
That is exactly my experience as well, I actually started to dig in the topic because I was trying to figure out stuff on my (mostly) non-combat rogue-lite! I don't think enemies are mandatory, it's just the most common conflict but a "human vs nature" or even "human vs self" can work too imo.
The offense/defense axis is strong to create interesting progression dilemmas & give a feeling of depth (in all sorts of games actually) but there is a lot more to explore :)
Very interesting comments, both of them. I really liked to hear more on those non-combat rogue-lite!
Would love to have a proper chat about this with you and to hear about your game
Hope dev is going well!
Very good artcile! Do you have any further reading on this topic?
Not specifically, but if you’ve got specific questions/terms, I found that Reddit often has interesting discussions (Google has few blog results)