When Dead Mage created Children of Morta, a narrative-driven 2D dungeon crawler, they ran into some challenges balancing the roguelike elements with the story progression. We talked to Reza Hooshangi, Lead Programmer at Dead Mage, about how they combined the huge possibilities of procedural generation associated with roguelike games with a sense of meaning and progress needed in narrative-driven games.
Making a procedural system requires that you define many rules and constraints that define the borders of what is possible in your game. In this blog post, we will look at defining a level structure, the challenges that arise when you introduce narrative elements, and the custom tool that Dead Mage built in Unity to balance the fresh feeling of random events with the narrative progression needed to support the story in their game.
