Buttonless

Plaorm: iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch (universal app)

Price: $1.99

Developer: Dinofarm Games

Publisher: Fusion Reacons

Released: May 4, 2010

100 Rogues

What Is It?

“Roguelikes” are games based on the 1986 PC game Rogue. Most roguelikes take place

in monster-lled dungeons, and the player’s goal

is to retrieve some object of great importance

from within the depths of the evil lair. One of the

most important characteristics of a roguelike is

that once the hero dies, he or she is gone forever.

Even if a player has poured hours into the devel-

opment of a character, geing surrounded by en-

emies and taking too much damage can result in

the permanent death of that hero. Every decision

players make becomes important when hours of

real-world time can be wasted through simple

mistakes.

100 Rogues takes all of the aforementioned

aributes and shrinks them into a tiny experi-

ence t for mobile devices. Instead of taking each

character you create on an epic journey that can

14  100 Rogues

potentially last for dozens of hours, each session of 100 Rogues lasts an average of ten

minutes. Your chosen characterwhether a spell-slinging mage or a sword-wielding cru-

saderlevels up and unlocks new abilities very quickly, and will likely live for only as

long as it takes to sit through a commercial break while watching television (yes, iPhone

games are the newest thing in mid-TV show entertainment). 100 Rogues is a new spin on

one of gaming’s most versatile genres, and it works beautifully on iOS.

Behind the Game

100 Rogues was not intended to be an ambitious game. e game began as a simple clone

of POWDER, a roguelike created by indie developer Je Lait (which happens to be avail-

able on the iPhone for free). Freshman developer Dinofarm Games had been commis-

sioned by Fusion Reactions to make an iOS game, and it felt that it was up to the task.

e game was scheduled to be completed in a lile over three months. Seventeen months

later, the game still wasn’t complete.

But let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves. To understand the troubled development

of 100 Rogues, you’ll need the perspective of Wes Paugh, a programmer for Fusion Re-

actions who worked on the game. “When I was hired to work on 100 Rogues, the game

had been in development for three months, which was about 85% of the way through

the initially estimated schedule,” says Paugh. “e indication was that I was brought on

to lend a quick hand with the last few stages of 100 Rogues and to start a new project

aer that.”

It soon became apparent that the “initially estimated schedule” wasn’t going to be fol-

lowed very closely, due largely to the fact that the scale of the game grew continuallyno

one working on the game had a clear idea of when features should stop being added.

According to Paugh, the original designs for the game had essentially been forgoen and

replaced with a feature list that required at least eight additional months of development.

“It was like designing and building a spaghei western lm set and, when nearly done,

deciding to build a functional town instead,” says Paugh.

Both Paugh and Keith Burgun, the game’s design lead, re-

member the moment that the vision for the game became clear.

Burgun had wanted to include a teleport ability in the game for

certain enemy types, and Paugh was able to code it surprisingly

easily. Paugh describes this as a watershed moment, in which

100 Rogues’ potential as a strategically rich game became clear.

“Just like that, the player had a new, uniquely strategic enemy to

face, and the game grew from an RPG in which you fought monsters with a bit higher stats

each level into a game that required skill and strategy,” he says.

Burgun agrees that it wasn’t until 100 Rogues had goen relatively far into develop-

ment that its nal form began to take shape. “As the game’s development went on, its

Stascs

• Development me: 18 months

• Total budget: $40,000

• Times downloaded: 100,000