I have no Ground and I must Scream
I likely wouldnt have been able to form a vision for Rogue Elements if it hadnt been for my attempt last year to play and review as many Roguelikes as I could. I reviewed and sorted my impressions over here and keep expanding that list over time:
https://www.resetera.com/threads/i-played-120-roguelikes-so-you-dont-have-to.1324564/
So many of these games are absolutely fantastic. Deep systems, engaging loops and super unique ideas. I couldnt hope to have my game ever be named in the same breadth as the best in the genre, but I one area felt often very underserved in almost all of these: The environments you are exploring almost never made an actual impact on player decisions. If you go all the way back, most paths to walk on were nothing but an empty black void and many Roguelikes still carry that tradition forward with ground tiles being mostly decorative:
Rogue
Outside of the 10 enemies roaming around in a level, that most a lot of the screen estate of these dungeons was restricted to an empty piece of information. This also leads to many traditional roguelikes making you run through a lot of empty corridors to get to the next interesting content. Many games solve this by adding an auto-explore button, that just forwards the exploration of the level until the next encounter/interesting element. But why are we designing most Roguelikes in a way that makes players want to skip 90% of them? That was the start of my journey for Rogue Elements. How can we make traversal be more interesting? How can we make traversal be an interesting gameplay element?
Zone of Terror
Harmonist
Harmonist was probably the first Roguelike where that element really "clicked" for me. Its a game that focusses on sneaking, not combat, making the envirronment your most important tool to use. Hide in barrels, burn grass to cut off paths, be aware of your positioning and spacing to walls to use them in emergency situations to jump to the wall and vault over the enemy behind you. This type of mobility is something I still would like expand on in Rogue Elements, but it set the foundation. After I added my base environments (Grass blocking sight, Ice for sliding, Mud for stopping movement, Stone for damage and Water for ruining euqipment in 2 intensities) and cloud effects changing the environments (fire clouds burning down grass to stone, dissipating small puddles to new clouds etc), the game became almost impossible to navigate. It was very hard to keep cloud effects apart and keeping track of level elements by hovering over every single element was rather frustrating. The Ground Gives Way had the solution.
The Ground Gives Way
It immediately hit me when I was playing TGGW. If I wanted to have every part of the environment be a challenge and moment to ponder, it was necessary to dedicate a part of the UI to the overview of on screen elements, so you wouldnt be forced to hover/examine every single tile of the dungeon, just to move one tile. And at that point, Rogue Elements finally clicked into place, and I realized that this is finally a concept worth playing. A single screen puzzle box, that gives you every information at one glance, while also potentially shifting the situation around you constantly.
Rogue Elements This didnt entirely solve everything, especially when you do want a more specific bit of information, so I ended up also implementing a hover tooltip, so you can now hover over all "fire clouds" for example, which gives an easy overview of which tiles those are. Another use case was items being hidden unter a pile of other items, so the hover tooltip allows you to figure out where exactly that precious fire wand is hiding. Similarly, players needed an easy way to gauge the danger levels of enemies, so enemies being able to kill you in 1-2 hits also received a glowing effect for their name. Despite the complexity, all information a player needs to decide on his next step is now communicated to the player without the need to dig through multiple menus. This was the moment, where I actually realized that this could be a game concept worth expanding on, carving out its own little niche in the Roguelike community.