Last Call - Getting Meta

With the basic structure of the combat system in place, I’ve spent much of the past two weeks working on building out all the pieces of Last Call’s core loop.

On the most basic level, an individual game of Last Call consists of the player building their party, heading into the tower, and making their way through various floors consisting of progressively harder battles along with non-combat options like shops and healing fountains.

Through winning battles, the party collects gold and experience. Gold can be used at shops to buy better trinkets that bestow various bonuses on a character. Experience is used to level up a character, giving the opportunity to either select new skills to learn or to improve existing skills.

It’s a pretty standard structure, and one that could certainly carry an entire game on its own. For me, though, there is a call I can’t resist: the call of the roguelite.

I love roguelites. They for sure make up the majority of the games I play. Heck, I even started a whole website about them for the Critical Distance webjam. So when I had the first seeds of the idea that became Wilderness, and then morphed into Last Call, I knew all along it would have an overarching roguelite frame.

Loops Within Loops

To me, the core of the roguelite is meta-progression. With every run through the core loop a player takes, they are gaining something that will help them in future runs. In the case of Last Call, my focus is on letting players improve their character builds in a way that lets them persist through to the next run.

As I said earlier, characters gain experience during a run and can select new skills upon leveling up. However, at any given time a character can only have four skills active, so a player has to be choosy about who is using what. Additionally, any skills learned during a run are lost when that run ends, and the character starts the next run with their default loadout.

There is room for growth, however! During the course of climbing the tower, the player has the opportunity to visit special rooms that give them the ability to make a skill permanent for a character. Should they choose to do this, it means when that character starts the next run, they will have that skill as part of their default loadout (albeit back to base level).

Characters are still limited to four skills, so even over the course of multiple runs a player can’t stuff everything onto one. Fortunately, each run also starts with the bartender helpfully offering a chance to forget a skill, so players aren’t stuck with a loadout they don’t want long term.

The idea is that over the course of many runs, players will be able to tailor their individual character builds to match the playstyle and balance they want. At the same time, there is still room within the individual runs to tweak those builds should the situation demand it.

Making skills permanent comes at a cost, though, as selecting a skill room means giving up on precious experience from battles, or an opportunity to heal, or perhaps even a shop with needed equipment. This should help create some interesting risk/reward scenarios for the player, as they will need to weigh giving up short term benefits in their current run vs the long term benefits of changing the character’s core abilities.

Now, there will be some other things that persist over the runs as well. In their trip up the tower, players may come across prisoners eager to escape. If they happen to have picked up the keys along the way, the player may be able to free them and have them join the party at the inn for future runs. There are a few other little secrets as well, but I’ll keep those hush-hush for now…

Finding a Balance

The challenge with creating this dual-loop structure is balancing challenge for the individual runs vs the improvements that player gains through the meta-progression. Individual runs need to be difficult, but not so difficult that the player feels like they are just grinding away to unlock growth for the future. Conversely, improvements gained through meta-progression shouldn’t be so overwhelming as to make the core of the game seem trivial.

From a design perspective, I’ve started from a focus on the individual run and how to make that challenging but fair. If the player isn’t having fun playing singular adventures through the tower, they certainly aren’t going to be encouraged to play lots of them to progress. From there, the next step is thinking about the rate at which the meta-progression advances, again with a focus on making it so the player doesn’t simply feel like they’re grinding. Lastly, putting the two together, there needs to be enough variety in challenge that the player doesn’t feel like they can simply lock onto the same party composition/loadout every time and be guaranteed success.

So, in total, just three totally simple balancing issues that, if done wrong, can completely disrupt enjoyment of the game. Easy!

In all seriousness, though, it’s an exciting challenge to tackle, albeit a slow one. Next time, I’ll dive more into the individual run structure and focus on some of the initial characters the player has available to them.

Next time: Meeting the characters and building a tower!

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