How To Combine Video Game Genres

In 2008, game designer Derek Yu couldn’t figure out what type of game to make next. Perhaps, he should make a platformer. But, despite making a few prototypes - nothing seemed right. So perhaps he should make a roguelike - you know, a top-down dungeon crawler, with randomly generated levels. But that didn’t work either. His prototypes just didn’t seem to add anything new to their respective genres. And that’s when it clicked.

What if he made a platformer - with tense jumps and scrappy, real-time combat. But, like a roguelike, the game would have randomly generated levels, and high stakes permadeath. And thus, Spelunky was born. And about eight million other games that borrow elements from the roguelike genre. You see, we like to put games into tidy little boxes. Platformers. First-person shooters. Racing games. Puzzlers. We neatly categorise games based on things like their mechanics, camera perspective, level structure, and rules.

But, brilliant things can be produced when those lines are blurred, and those genres are mushed together. Sadly, it’s not at easy as chucking a bunch of things into a pot and hoping something good comes out. Get the mix wrong, and the result can be disastrous. So, in this video let’s look at how games can shove together radically different genres… with success. I’m Mark Brown, and this is Game Maker’s Toolkit.

Okay, so I think there are three different ways to combine genres in games. And so I’ll start with what I’m calling the “hand-off method”. This is when a game jumps back and forth between different genres, at different times. So, consider Persona - which is sometimes a dungeon-crawling JRPG, and sometimes a visual novel-like life simulator. Or Uncharted, which quickly bounces between shooting, platforming, puzzle solving, and driving.

The key advantage to this approach is pacing and variety. It can get boring to do the exact same type of gameplay for hours on end, so if you mix up the genre, you can keep players engaged for longer. It can also be used to make sure the gameplay always fits what’s happening in the narrative - because tense RPG battles wouldn’t make sense when you’re doing after-school chores. The biggest challenge here is that some players may not like every genre in the mix.

If you bought God of War for the frantic, ultra violent, button-bashy, combat… then you might find the slow-paced puzzles to be a complete drag. There are some solutions to this, though. Like, Uncharted does have puzzles… but they’re not exactly brain-busting conundrums. In this series, the combat seems to be the primary genre - and so that’s where you’ll find the most depth and challenge. The secondary genres are pretty much just palette cleansing fluff - and so they’re kept super simple to ensure they don’t upset players who only want to do the shooty bits.

Going further, you can make those secondary genres optional. In Shovel Knight: King of Cards, you never need to play the card battler if you’d prefer to just focus on the platforming. In L.A. Noire, if you fail at these dopy third-person shooter bits, you can skip right past them to get back to the detective puzzles. And in the Yakuza series, you never need to bother with the management side of things, after you’ve passed the tutorial.

You can also try to pick genres with strong similarities, so it’s likely that players will enjoy both types of game. If you enjoy the turn-based tactical battles in XCOM, then it’s not a huge stretch to assume that you’ll also like the strategic layer. Consider what sort of skills are required in the primary genre, and be wary of asking players to suddenly need entirely different ones. I mean, a rhythm-based boss battle.

Really? Another challenge is that players may be confused about how they should be approaching the current level. I ran into this problem with the first demo for my Untitled Magnet Game. I wanted to include both logic-based puzzles, and tricky platforming challenges - but players didn’t always know if the level required them to engage their brain… or engage their thumbs. One solution to this problem is to simply communicate this information to the player.

In Grapple Dog, there should be no confusion about how to tackle these speed-run, time-attack stages - I mean, the door has a fast-forward icon on it, there’s a countdown, Pablo starts in a sprinter’s pose, the background is a racing flag, and so on. Another solution is to just change the player’s current actions from level to level - or punish the player for using the wrong ones. In the Batman: Arkham games, if you try to play these stealth sections like a beat ‘em up, you’ll very quickly end up full of holes.

The final challenge is that the different genres can distract from each other, or compete for the player’s attention, or break the game’s flow. Sid Meier discovered this when making Covert Action - a game where you solve a mystery by doing various mini-games. Meier says that when players got sucked in to action scenes that were too long, too intense, and felt disconnected from everything else... they forgot all about the mystery.

He says “You'd spend ten minutes or so, of real time, in a mission. And by the time you got out of [it], you had no idea of what was going on in the world.” One solution is to keep the different segments short - so you’re always coming back to the main event. Or, to always have the different genres feed in to each other - back in XCOM, the advances you make in your base will directly impact your chances in the tactical battles.

And the decisions you make on the battlefield will feed back into your base. That way you never forget about the other side of the game. But the main solution is to consider the game’s core focus, and to make sure everything is pointing in that same direction. In Persona, the games are all about your relationship with your core group of friends. And that’s a theme that is strongly evoked in both the RPG battles and the regular life simulator stuff.

Okay, so the second way to combine genres is to use the “play style method”. This is when you can approach a game in multiple ways, using skills and actions that come from different genres of game. Deus Ex was designed as a mash-up of first-person shooter, RPG, and stealth game - and so you can play the game in whatever mode you prefer. And in Skyrim, you can play with magic spells, swords and shields, bow and arrow, and more.

The advantage to this approach is player choice and agency. You get to pick a genre that you like best, and play the game in that style. It’s also good for variety, as you can jump between different genres when you feel like it - and it gives you a good reason to play through the game multiple times. The challenge is that your game is going to be compared to titles that focus on doing a single thing really well. Deus Ex is brilliant, but the constituent parts just pale in comparison to its contemporaries like Half-Life, Baldur’s Gate, and Thief.

Designer Warren Spector says “if we get judged on the basis of any individual genre, we’re doomed because we’re just not going to be as good.” So it’s important to really communicate the advantages of letting players decide their own play style - through marketing and in-game messages. Another challenge is that you’re almost making multiple games at once. And that means your resources get spread pretty thin. The modern Wolfenstein games are designed to have three play styles - dubbed mayhem, tactical, and stealth.

But Machine Games has admitted that it just didn’t spend as much time on stealth - leading to annoying gameplay like guards spotting you too easily. In terms of design, another challenge is that when presented with multiple play styles, a great deal of players will just choose one and stick with it to the end credits - refusing to try anything else. We see this when players quick load back to a previous save file when they get spotted in Dishonored - instead of switching to a more violent play style.

Designers should be careful not to compound the problem, by rewarding the actions made in a play style… with tools and skills that help that play style. Positive feedback loop right there. Instead, try giving general skill points that can be spent on any type of action - or allow the player to re-spec and try a completely different build. Designers can also give players an incentive to try out different styles. In Hades, it can be tempting to stick to a single weapon - but the game provides a reward for swapping to a new one.

You can also use the narrative and context to allow for different approaches. Perhaps Dishonored’s judgmental chaos system stopped you from killing - but in Deathloop, there’s no such system. And the entire world resets every morning, so if your actions aren’t gonna have lasting consequences, why not try something different? What you probably don’t want to do is force players to choose another play style, by suddenly making one approach impossible.

In Deus Ex: Human Revolution, you can play in both lethal and non-lethal ways - that is, until the boss battles which force you to fight. Even if you don’t have the skills or items to do so. This was such a bone of contention that the bosses were completely redesigned in the game’s Director’s Cut. The solution here is to ensure that each play style has a valid, and enjoyable route through each and every level. Then, studios need to thoroughly test the game in every possible play style to ensure there are no brick walls.

Because if you make the promise of “play it your way”, some players are simply going to feel betrayed if you suddenly make their preferred approach impossible.

The third, and final way to mix genres is to use the “blend method”. This is when we take aspects from two different genres, and merge them together to make something new. So Portal has cursor-based aiming and a first-person camera, borrowed from shooters. And it pairs that with puzzles from, well, puzzle games. Battlechef Brigade has knockabout combat from a brawler, mixed with the puzzles of a match-three game. Rocket League is FIFA meets Burnout.

The advantage to this method is the creation of entirely new games, and perhaps even new genres. And so we get wildly novel and inventive titles like Crypt of the Necrodancer - a rhythm-based roguelike. And Toodee and Topdee - a puzzle game where you can switch from top-down box-shoving to side-on platforming at the press of a button. It can also be used to freshen up dusty old genres, by looking outside of current conventions.

RPGs typically have clunky turn-based battles, but we’ve seen role-playing games borrow from brawlers, puzzle games, third-person shooters, bullet hell shmups, and rhythm-action titles. A potential problem with this approach is that the two genres may end up just being incompatible. The Metroidvania Chasm is a good example. Perhaps the biggest advantage of the Metroidvania is a richly detailed, handcrafted world map.

But Chasm skips that by pairing up with a roguelike, which has the disadvantage of using procedural generation to make worlds that feel quite bland and impersonal. Another example is how the RPG elements added to Assassin’s Creed subtly undermine the assassin fantasy, by removing instant stealth kills on higher-level enemies. Or how the loot-based armour system in Marvel’s Avengers awkwardly fits with the superhero theme.

Did I just upgrade The Hulk’s skeleton?! So, instead, you should use genres that complement each other. Back to Spelunky, Derek Yu liked how platformers were easy to pick up and play, but didn’t like how the games relied on players memorising level layouts. And as for roguelikes, he loved the variety in the random level generation - but didn’t like all the cryptic commands and systems. But by combining the two, the positives of one genre managed to actually cancel out the negatives of the other.

Derek Yu says “Nothing was compromised to make something else fit and each part only boosted the signal of the other parts.” You can also look for genres with a lot of similarities, so that they’ll gel together more easily. When Yacht Club Games mashed up a roguelike with an action puzzler in Shovel Knight: Pocket Dungeon, the studio realised that the two genres have a lot of similarities. They both operate on grids, have simple controls, involve a lot of randomness, feature long runs that start from scratch, and require thinking several moves ahead.

It was easy, and natural, to put them together. So, there we have it.

You can combine genres by switching back and forth at different times. By letting players choose their own playstyle. Or by blending together different genres to make something new. But whatever route you take, there are challenges to overcome. The games in this video show that the problems aren’t unsolvable - you just need to be smart about your design. Let me know your favourite genre mash-ups, in the comments down below.

Hey, thanks for watching! Did you know that I made a video essay that you can play? Platformer Toolkit, now available on Itch.io, is a free game that lets you see what it’s like to make your own platformer - giving you access to dozens of sliders, checkboxes and graphs that drive the main character’s movement. Check it out!