Spelunky

A locked mystery plants a question players work to answer. The Moai head acts as a locked door, and players must puzzle out how to use the ankh to reach a special exit.

Unlike TV mysteries such as Lost, games let players close the curiosity gap through action. Derek Yu calls discovering things on your own the fun part of games.

Pick genres whose strengths cancel each other's weaknesses. Derek Yu liked how easy platformers are to pick up but disliked memorising level layouts, and loved roguelike variety but disliked cryptic commands. Joining his two prototypes, neither new on its own, produced Spelunky: platforming removed roguelike obscurity and random levels removed memorisation.

The mix pairs tense jumps and scrappy real-time combat with random levels and permadeath. Yu: "Nothing was compromised to make something else fit and each part only boosted the signal of the other parts."

Cutting a genre to its core ideas opened it to new games. The 2008 Berlin Interpretation defined roguelikes by 14 factors, keeping games as small tweaks on one template. Spelunky, released in 2008, reduced it to permadeath and procedural generation, and Mark Brown credits it with starting a new era of roguelikes and inspiring about eight million games that borrow roguelike elements.

Procedural levels stop players memorising jumps, so they have to improve baseline skills instead.

Keep the camera out of dead space so the frame shows gameplay. Levels sit inside an impenetrable rocky border and the camera can't go far into it, leaving more of the screen for things the player can interact with.

Pick genres whose strengths cancel each other's weaknesses. Derek Yu liked how easy platformers are to pick up but disliked memorising level layouts, and loved roguelike variety but disliked cryptic commands. Joining his two prototypes, neither new on its own, produced Spelunky: platforming removed roguelike obscurity and random levels removed memorisation.

The mix pairs tense jumps and scrappy real-time combat with random levels and permadeath. Yu: "Nothing was compromised to make something else fit and each part only boosted the signal of the other parts."

Cutting a genre to its core ideas opened it to new games. The 2008 Berlin Interpretation defined roguelikes by 14 factors, keeping games as small tweaks on one template. Spelunky, released in 2008, reduced it to permadeath and procedural generation, and Mark Brown credits it with starting a new era of roguelikes and inspiring about eight million games that borrow roguelike elements.

Procedural levels stop players memorising jumps, so they have to improve baseline skills instead.

A ghost pressures dawdlers into decisions without ending their run. About two and a half minutes into a level a ghost appears, so players can't comb every room and grab every treasure. It doesn't kill outright, so you can still run for the exit, and it drew far less backlash than XCOM 2's mission-failing timers.

Yu: "I wanted to force them to make difficult decisions and experience both the satisfaction of choosing correctly and the regret of choosing poorly." Games without such pressure, like Returnal and Deathloop, leave players joylessly scouring emptied levels for gear.

Big swings in starting luck push players to restart for good items. Crates usually hold bombs or ropes but occasionally a shotgun or jetpack that makes a run far easier, so speedrunners restart until they get one and it becomes hard to tell skill from luck.

Spelunky does soften one swing: it skips its dark levels if you cleared the previous stage in under 20 seconds, to be merciful to speedrunners.

Slay the Spire ties starting bonuses to last run's progress. Slay the Spire gives bonuses at the start of a run only if you reached the first boss last time, so players work with what they're given instead of restarting for luck, a contrast with Spelunky's crates.

Resetting everything each run makes every win prove skill. Every Spelunky run starts with the same health, bombs and money, so the only way to beat the game is learning its systems and practising the controls.

Mark Brown prefers this purity over roguelites like Rogue Legacy, whose slow power accumulation brings a backwards difficulty curve and ambiguity over why a player won. The cost: a pure roguelike gives low-skilled players no way to ease difficulty, so some may never finish.

Shortcuts help new players but cost them the full reward. Doing chores for the tunnel man opens hub doors that start you deeper, such as in the jungle skipping the first four mine rooms. Shortcut runs don't count on the leaderboard and skip the damsels, money, Kali points and items needed to reach the City of Gold and the true ending in hell.

This lets players practise harder areas while the game steers them back to full runs. Yu said the goal was "to guide players toward my vision of how it's meant to be played."

Failure stays engaging when runs are short and each attempt differs. Spelunky is full of failure, yet players return because runs are relatively short, they feel themselves improving, and random generation makes the next session markedly different.

A ghost pressures dawdlers into decisions without ending their run. About two and a half minutes into a level a ghost appears, so players can't comb every room and grab every treasure. It doesn't kill outright, so you can still run for the exit, and it drew far less backlash than XCOM 2's mission-failing timers.

Yu: "I wanted to force them to make difficult decisions and experience both the satisfaction of choosing correctly and the regret of choosing poorly." Games without such pressure, like Returnal and Deathloop, leave players joylessly scouring emptied levels for gear.

Pick genres whose strengths cancel each other's weaknesses. Derek Yu liked how easy platformers are to pick up but disliked memorising level layouts, and loved roguelike variety but disliked cryptic commands. Joining his two prototypes, neither new on its own, produced Spelunky: platforming removed roguelike obscurity and random levels removed memorisation.

The mix pairs tense jumps and scrappy real-time combat with random levels and permadeath. Yu: "Nothing was compromised to make something else fit and each part only boosted the signal of the other parts."

Copy the feeling a feature creates, not the feature itself. Spelunky kept only Rogue's random levels and meaningful death and dropped turn-based play, grids and ASCII art, yet still captures Rogue's surprise and peril.

Asking why features were designed and what experience they produce lets a developer find a different way to deliver the same feeling, instead of making nearly the same game.

Cutting a genre to its core ideas opened it to new games. The 2008 Berlin Interpretation defined roguelikes by 14 factors, keeping games as small tweaks on one template. Spelunky, released in 2008, reduced it to permadeath and procedural generation, and Mark Brown credits it with starting a new era of roguelikes and inspiring about eight million games that borrow roguelike elements.

Procedural levels stop players memorising jumps, so they have to improve baseline skills instead.

Simple scripted enemies become hard in groups and varied terrain. Spelunky's enemies act in an almost completely scripted way and would be trivial alone, but groups, different environments and interactions with other characters create the challenge.

Shortcuts help new players but cost them the full reward. Doing chores for the tunnel man opens hub doors that start you deeper, such as in the jungle skipping the first four mine rooms. Shortcut runs don't count on the leaderboard and skip the damsels, money, Kali points and items needed to reach the City of Gold and the true ending in hell.

This lets players practise harder areas while the game steers them back to full runs. Yu said the goal was "to guide players toward my vision of how it's meant to be played."