How to Make a Roguelike (The 3 Pillars of Design)

Blurbs, a voice known for equal parts silly charm and serious game analysis, lays out a concise blueprint for what makes roguelikes sing. In a short but insightful exploration, Blurbs identifies three foundational pillars that elevate permadeath-driven games from frustrating to compulsively replayable: base simplicity, thoughtful world structure, and a swelling sense of player power. This article expands on those core ideas, translating the video’s perspective into a comprehensive guide for designers, developers, and curious players who want to understand the craft behind some of gaming’s most elegant systems. and How to Make a Roguelike

Roguelikes are a unique design challenge. At their heart they are unforgiving: one life, no save scumming, and failure that forces complete restarts. That harshness demands generosity in systems that reward the player’s time and skill. Blurbs suggests that when designers get three things right — simplicity, structure, and power — the resulting systems feel fair, exciting, and addictive. The following sections unpack each pillar, show how they interplay, and provide practical implementation advice, examples from modern roguelikes, and pitfalls to avoid.

Why Roguelikes Need a Philosophy

Permadeath is not merely a difficulty knob; it fundamentally alters player psychology. Every decision takes on more weight. Players learn to read systems, to manage risk, and to trust their skills. The possiblity of a single run erasing hours of progress can either feel crushing or exhilarating depending on design choices. The philosophy Blurbs articulates is about converting the threat of loss into a meaningful loop of mastery and discovery.

Three simple, interlocking pillars give designers a framework to keep players engaged despite repeated failure. They also provide guardrails that prevent a roguelike from leaning too heavily on randomness or unfairness. When the core loop is clear and the world scaffolds discovery, the player’s repeated attempts become the primary reward: the joy of getting better.

Pillar One: Simplicity — Start With a Clean, Familiar Base

“The first destination of roguelike design is simplicity.” That line is blunt and purposeful: the best roguelikes often begin with a straightforward mechanical kernel. Simplicity means two things at once. First, the initial core mechanic must be obvious and approachable. Second, the system should be composable — simple pieces that can be combined to create complexity without burdening comprehension.

Why simple cores matter

When death is permanent, players should feel the improvement is theirs, not just the product of unlockables or meta progression. A simple core helps achieve that. Downwell is an oft-cited example: you fall downward and shoot. That mechanic is consistent on every run, so the sensation of progress is purely player skill refinement. The world shifts around the player, but the player’s capabilities remain recognizably constant from run to run.

Starting from an accessible base also reduces cognitive load, letting designers layer variation without overwhelming players early. When the base is familiar, players can quickly form hypotheses about systems, test them, and enjoy the learning curve. Dead Cells works this way: it borrows the Metroidvania rhythm of exploration and combat, so players enter the roguelike with an implicit rule set.

How to choose a simple mechanical base

• Pick a single, declarative verb: run, jump, shoot, draw, build. This verb will be the player’s consistent anchor.
• Lean on existing paradigms: adapt a known genre (deckbuilding, platformer, bullet-hell) to take advantage of player intuition.
• Keep feedback immediate: players should know the result of actions instantly so they can refine skill and strategy.
• Design for composability: the core mechanic should accept additions (items, modifiers, synergies) that multiply possibilities without changing the primary rule.

Practical patterns for maintaining simplicity

1. Limit the early toolkit: Teach a small set of mechanics in the first zone so players can internalize relationships between inputs and outcomes.
2. Use a gentle learning curve: Begin with predictable enemies and few interactive layers, then introduce more variations as players demonstrate mastery.
3. Make systems visible: Use clear visual and audio cues so the player understands cause and effect (e.g., damage numbers, status icons).
4. Allow skill expression: Ensure that player skill, not just item RNG, affects outcomes. Dodging, aiming, timing, and decision-making should reward practice.

When simplicity is respected, the moment-to-moment gameplay becomes about the player rather than obscure subsystems. The player’s perceived competence increases because the world doesn’t mask their improvement with hidden variables or opaque mechanics.

Pillar Two: World Structure — Give Players a Map They Can Read

Simple mechanics make the player feel skilled. World structure gives them context and reasons to push forward. Without structure, procedural generation can feel random and aimless, turning each run into disconnected chaos. Good structure creates landmarks, pacing, and a sense of progression that persists across lives.

Levels, zones, and the arc of progression

Dividing a roguelike into discrete areas — zones, acts, layers, or floors — provides tangible milestones. Hades demonstrates this well: each layer becomes slightly less hellish as the player advances, offering a visible arc and a promise of improvement. That promise keeps players engaged: the next zone is a fresh reward for mastering the previous one.

Zones don’t have to be purely aesthetic. They can introduce mechanical themes, enemy archetypes, and unique hazards that teach players new skills while preserving the core loop. The transition from early to mid-game should feel like stepping into a new test of the same competencies — harder but also more richly rewarding.

Clear map layout in procedural worlds

Procedural generation is an enormous boon to replayability, but it comes with the risk of creating unintuitive layouts. Enter the idea of “readable randomness“: rooms and patterns must communicate meaning so the player can make informed choices. Enter the Gungeon does this excellently: its rooms use visual shorthand and distinct symbols, enabling players to predict room types and plan a route.

When rooms read well, the meta-game of route selection becomes an engaging layer: do you risk a dangerous shortcut to reach a boss with a better chance, or do you take the longer, safer path to collect more resources? The ability to evaluate these trade-offs is a major part of roguelike engagement.

Design rules for robust world structure

• Define clear acts: Create a small number of repeatable, distinct zones so players feel a sense of forward movement.
• Use consistent visual language: Room types, enemy signatures, and item cues should use consistent motifs so players can pattern-match.
• Pace risk and reward: Place high-reward encounters at predictable but challenging intervals to incentivize play without frustration.
• Scaffold player goals: Offer short-term goals (reach the boss, clear the gauntlet) and long-term hooks (unlockable characters, narrative reveals).

Making progression feel meaningful

Progression in roguelikes is peculiar because it is often cyclical: you get close to the end, fail, and start again. Designers can enhance each loop’s meaning by introducing persistent meta-progression or by varying the stakes of each run. Persistent unlocks (new classes, weapons, or modifiers) give a sense of cumulative progress, while on-run spikes of power create exhilarating windows of dominance.

Balance is critical. If meta-progression makes runs trivial, the thrill of discovery collapses. If meta-progression is too stingy, repeated failure becomes demoralizing. The designer’s job is to calibrate how much carry-over is allowed between runs to preserve the tension while acknowledging player time investment.

Pillar Three: Swelling Power — Let the Player Feel Overpowered (Temporarily)

One of the most magnetic aspects of modern roguelikes is the “I’m busted” moment: a run where synergies and items align to create dominance. Blurbs calls this the need to “give the player a sense of power” — to make them feel like they’ve broken the game, even briefly. This feeling is crucial because it counters the permanent-death sting with moments of exhilarating mastery.

The psychology of power in permadeath games

Power fantasies serve psychological functions. They shorten the perceived length of a long run, provide dopamine-rich apex moments, and give players the memory anchor that keeps them returning. Even if the power evaporates quickly (as it should), those brief windows justify the grind of repeated failure.

Designers must craft systems that allow for emergent overpowered combinations while avoiding permanent imbalance. The sweet spot is ephemeral dominance: enough to feel thrilling, not enough to trivialize the entire game. Inscryption (often misspelled as ‘Inscription’) and Dead Cells do this well. In Inscryption, combining cheap resources and strong effects produces a card that stomps opponents for a few encounters but faces counters later. In Dead Cells, stacking weapon traits can create brief windows where the player rockets through enemies, but bosses or certain rooms reassert danger.

Designing for emergent power without breaking the loop

• Enable synergies, don’t require them: Players should be rewarded for finding combos but not punished for missing them.
• Introduce diminishing returns: Limit how long a single build remains dominant through enemy design, scaling, or targeted counters.
• Reward player recognition: Make the discovery of a strong synergy feel like a player achievement — through audio/visual flourishes and tangible payoff.
• Balance randomness and control: Allow players to influence outcomes via decisions, skill, and risk-taking rather than pure luck.

Examples of ephemeral power done right

1. Inscryption：Combining inexpensive resources yields a card that can dominate early fights, creating a memorable surge. Later enemies introduce counters or require different approaches, bringing the player back to skill and planning.
2. Dead Cells：Multiple passive and active items stack to create rapid clears. That feeling of slicing through rooms is intoxicating but bosses with specific phases and resistances restore the challenge.
3. Slay the Spire：Synergistic card collections produce runs where combos snowball, but new elites and certain curses counter overreliance on one tactic.

Bringing the Pillars Together — Systems, Trade-offs, and Harmony

Each pillar is powerful on its own, but their combination is where roguelikes become masterpieces of design. Simplicity gives players a learning surface. Structure creates context and direction. Swelling power supplies moments of triumph. Together, they produce a loop: learn the basics, navigate the world, find or craft a powerful build, and then either succeed or fail — with failure teaching and succeeding rewarding.

Trade-offs to manage

Roguelike design is an exercise in trade-offs. Emphasizing one pillar too strongly can erode another.

• Simplicity vs. Depth: Too simple and runs may become repetitive; too complex and early runs become confusing. The solution: keep the start simple and let depth emerge via modular systems.
• Structure vs. Surprise: Too rigid structure can remove wonder; too much randomness can make progression meaningless. Use readable patterns and seeded surprises.
• Temporary power vs. Permanence: If power becomes permanent, runs lose challenge. If power is too fleeting, the player never experiences moments of dominance. Meta-progression and short-lived synergies should coexist carefully.

Designers must map their priorities and test how different mixes feel in practice. Usability testing focused on runway difficulty, perception of fairness, and frequency of “I felt powerful” moments will reveal whether the chosen mix resonates.

Tools and techniques for designers

Below are concrete tools that designers can use to realize the three pillars:

• Environmental telegraphing: Use art and sound to hint at room mechanics and hazards. This directly supports both simplicity and structure by making rooms readable.
• Template-driven procedural generation: Build levels from curated templates rather than random tiles to ensure encounters convey meaning and fairness.
• Soft-caps and counters: Apply diminishing returns or enemy abilities that specifically counter popular builds to keep balance.
• Visibility of progression: Provide mid-run markers such as bosses, shops, or safe rooms so players can measure success during a run.
• Feedback loops: Implement clear indicators when a synergy is active (visual FX, distinct audio) to amplify the power fantasy reward.
• Meta-progression calibration: Test different amounts of persistent unlocks to see how they affect run tension and player retention.

Design Patterns & Case Studies

Examining specific games helps translate theory into practice. The following mini case studies illustrate how leading roguelikes implement the three pillars.

Downwell — Minimalist mastery

Core idea: fall down a vertical well while shooting with your boots. Downwell exemplifies minimalism. There are few mechanics: movement, firing, and simple pickups. Yet the moment-to-moment combat is rich because enemy patterns demand learning. The player’s improvement is obvious: better movement and reaction, not arbitrary stat gains. This preserves the purity of the roguelike premise — that competence, not accumulation, is the primary reward.

Dead Cells — Metroidvania meets roguelike

Core idea: fast, responsive combat with modular weapon and mutation systems. Dead Cells begins simple, progressively introducing weapon types and synergies. The world is divided into distinct biomes with recognizable themes. Players experience surges of power through weapon stacking and mutations, but bosses and environmental hazards frequently reassert danger. That rhythm — build up then be humbled — keeps runs dynamic.

Enter the Gungeon — Readable procedural design

Core idea: a top-down bullet-hell shooter with a heavy emphasis on loot and quirky weaponry. Enter the Gungeon’s rooms use consistent icons and visual language, which allows players to learn what to expect even in procedurally generated maps. That readability supports strategic choices and a satisfying flow of risk assessment versus reward acquisition.

Hades — Narrative and pacing in roguelikes

Core idea: repeated escape attempts tied to persistent character relationships and incremental narrative. Hades blends tight combat with a strong structural arc of rooms and bosses. The game’s structure softens the sting of failure: each run moves the story slightly forward, and rooms evolve in tone as the player progresses. This shows how structure can carry both mechanical and emotional weight.

Slay the Spire — Card-driven emergent power

Core idea: deckbuilding where each card drawn dramatically alters tactical possibilities. Slay the Spire’s simplicity is in its turn structure and core card interactions, but the emergent synergies can create dominant runs. The game balances this by introducing curses, elites, and diverse relics that occasionally disrupt favored plans. Players feel godlike when a deck functions as intended but must adapt when iterated encounters demand change.

Practical Checklist for Building a Roguelike

This checklist distills the three pillars into actionable steps that designers can apply during prototyping and iteration.

• Core mechanic: Define the single, simple action that anchors player experience. Prototype it until it feels satisfying in isolation.
• Visibility: Ensure every mechanic has immediate and clear feedback (visual, audio, numeric if needed).
• Zone design: Create a small set of curated zone templates with distinct themes and mechanical identities.
• Readable RNG: Use visual shorthand for room types and hazards so players can plan under procedural generation.
• Power windows: Design items and combos that create temporary dominance, paired with counters to restore challenge later.
• Meta-progression policy: Decide how much carries between runs and how quickly the player can accrue permanent growth.
• Difficulty pacing: Ramp complexity and challenge gradually across zones, with clearly signposted spikes (mini-bosses, elites).
• Data collection: Instrument runs to collect metrics on run length, player death location, item pickup usage, and build frequency.
• Player testing: Observe how players form heuristics and where they get confused; simplify or clarify based on behavior, not assumptions.

Metrics & Measurement: How to Know If It Works

Quantitative and qualitative feedback are both important for tuning a roguelike. The following metrics help evaluate whether the three pillars are functioning as intended:

• Average run length: Too short may be unrewarding; too long may be punishing. Aim for a target that matches the intended session length.
• Death distribution: Track where players die most. Clustering at a specific zone indicates a potential difficulty spike that may be unintentional.
• Item usage rates: Which items are picked or ignored? High variance may indicate either overpowered or underwhelming options.
• Build diversity: How many distinct builds reach late-game? Low diversity suggests balance problems or a dominant strategy.
• Return rate and retention: Are players coming back after failing? Low return suggests frustration or lack of perceived progress.
• Player feedback sentiment: Gather player comments on perceived fairness, clarity, and “I felt powerful” moments.

Use telemetry to inform iterative changes. If players rarely reach a late zone, consider tweaking difficulty pacing or adding mid-run power spikes to increase feelings of efficacy. If one item dominates, introduce counters or lower its drop rate while increasing the viability of alternatives.

Common Pitfalls & How to Avoid Them

Even experienced teams fall into traps while building roguelikes. The table below summarizes common errors and corrective strategies.

• Overcomplicating the start: Players are overwhelmed. Solution: restrict the initial move set and reveal systems gradually.
• Opaque RNG: Players feel cheated when randomness dominates outcomes with no recourse. Solution: provide visible signals and player agency to mitigate luck.
• Endless difficulty spikes: Players feel punished rather than challenged. Solution: smooth difficulty curves and give skill-based counters.
• Broken synergies: A single combo trivializes the game. Solution: re-balance, add enemy mechanics, or introduce diminishing returns.
• Lack of meaningful milestones: Runs feel aimless. Solution: create clear acts, bosses, or narrative beats that act as anchors.

On Narrative, Atmosphere, and Emotional Payoff

Structure doesn’t only serve mechanics; it can carry story and emotional progress. Hades is again instructive: its structure scaffolds a personal narrative that rewards repeated attempts with incremental revelations. Narrative in roguelikes need not be a linear tale — it can be episodic, emergent, and tied to player actions.

When designing narrative in a roguelike, consider tying story beats to milestones or player choices. Make failure part of the narrative texture: each death can reveal character, history, or new dialogue that reframes the experience. This approach transforms repeated loss into a method for discovery, not humiliation.

Design Exercises to Practice the Three Pillars

These exercises help teams internalize the principles without building a full game.

1. The One-Verb Prototype: Build a playable prototype around a single verb (e.g., dash, throw, swap). Add one enemy type and one pickup. Play until the core loop feels satisfying.
2. Room Shorthand Test: Create ten room templates and assign a symbol to each (treasure, trap, elite, shop). Randomize rooms and see if playtesters can predict contents based on symbols alone.
3. Synergy Sprint: Craft five items that each modify the core verb. Let players combine them freely and document memorable emergent combos. Then introduce enemies that counter the most frequent combinations.
4. Meta-Progression Calibration: Simulate a progression system with small persistent upgrades and tune how many runs are needed to feel meaningful but not mandatory.

FAQ

What exactly qualifies as a roguelike?

A roguelike is typically defined by permanent death (permadeath) and procedurally generated content. However, modern usage is broader: many games that borrow roguelike traits (permadeath, procedural levels, high replayability) are called roguelites. The key design intent is that each run matters and failure forces a meaningful restart.

Should roguelikes always be brutally difficult?

Not necessarily. Difficulty should be purposeful, not punitive. The challenge must align with the game’s intended audience and the designer’s goals. Some roguelikes aim for a tense, highly challenging experience; others aim for accessibility with frequent “power windows” that let more casual players enjoy victories.

How much randomness is too much?

Randomness becomes problematic when it removes player agency or obscures cause and effect. Readable randomness — where outcomes are varied but understandable — enhances replayability. The designer should ensure players can make meaningful choices to influence randomness (choice of path, resource allocation, skillful play).

Should power feel permanent or temporary?

Most well-designed roguelikes favor temporary on-run power combined with limited persistent progression. Temporary power provides thrilling peaks during a run; persistent meta-progression rewards repeated play and reduces early-game frustration. The balance depends on how much the game wants to privilege momentary mastery versus long-term advancement.

How do you prevent dominant strategies from ruining replayability?

Introduce counters, design enemies and zones that punish overreliance, and promote build diversity through rewards and item rarity. Telemetry helps identify dominant strategies early so designers can iterate. Additionally, encourage creative build paths by making less-popular options interesting in niche but powerful ways.

How do narrative and roguelike mechanics co-exist?

Many successful roguelikes use incremental narrative beats unlocked across runs. Failure becomes a narrative device rather than a frustration point. Keep story fragments distributable and tied to milestones so players feel progress even while repeating runs.

What should the first 10 minutes of a roguelike teach the player?

Teach the core verb, basic enemy patterns, one or two pickups, and the concept of zones. The player should feel competent in core actions and understand the immediate goals (reach the next zone, defeat the miniboss). Avoid overwhelming them with every mechanic in the first stretch.

Is procedural generation necessary?

No, but procedural generation is a common tool for replayability. If handcrafted levels are used, designers must create enough variety or modular combinations to keep runs fresh. Procedural generation helps scale variety with smaller teams, but it requires careful template design to retain readability.

What are suitable session lengths for roguelikes?

Session length should match the intended audience and platform. Shorter sessions (10–20 minutes) favor mobile or quick-play audiences; longer sessions (45–90 minutes) suit deeper, console/PC-oriented experiences. Design pacing and checkpointing (or lack thereof) with session length in mind.

How do you test whether a power fantasy is satisfying?

Observe playtesters: do they smile, exclaim, or narrate when a synergy fires? Look for behavioral changes such as taking more risks during a power spike. Use surveys: ask players to rate how “heroic” or “powerful” they felt at key moments. Combine qualitative feedback with engagement metrics (longer runs, more retries after powerful runs).

Conclusion — Roguelikes as Masterclasses in Design

Blurbs frames roguelikes as games that demand deliberate craftsmanship. By starting from a simple, comprehensible core, layering readable and purposeful structure, and crafting ephemeral moments of dominance, designers can make permadeath not a punishment but the engine of meaningful play. The three pillars — simplicity, world structure, and swelling power — are not a checklist but a conversation between systems. When balanced, they produce experiences that are frustrating and thrilling in equal measure, and that keep players returning run after run.

Roguelikes are design-rich. Every room, enemy, and item is a conversation with the player: will you risk it? Will you experiment? Will you get better? When a roguelike succeeds, it feels less like a mechanical exercise and more like an invitation to become skilled, cunning, and occasionally unstoppable — even if only for a brief, glorious run.