Is it possible to have a Roguelite sandbox?
This relates to a desire of mine to make a game with many different win-conditions, and some incentive for players to achieve all or many of them?
It’s possible to have a Roguelike sandbox. Dwarf Fortress was one of the original titles of that hybrid genre.
But is it possible to mix a Roguelite with sandbox mechanics? A normal Roguelite feature is timeboxing, where each run only lasts a relatively short amount of time, instead of being an extended campaign.
Timeboxing is one of the main features that appeals to me about Roguelites. Its lack is one of the main things I dislike about Roguelikes.
I realize one of my the main reasons I’ve disliked sandboxes is because they have open ended run times.
Sandboxes fall in two categories, full and partial, which effects how players normally handle playthroughs.
In full sandboxes, the world is a canvas and the player starts a new game any time they want a fresh canvas to paint new things on.
Partial sandboxes are usually more narrative driven, with a focus on quests and achievements. In such cases the players usually have less incentive to start a new game.
Partial sandboxes usually have a more static state that seems to change while playing but springs back into its baseline form when the player leaves and returns.
But what if there was a sandbox with a fixed micro-scope? It was designed for short, heavily branching playthroughs?
That seems like it would work, but that is minimally charted territory.
The closest game I have seen to that is Reventure, which I enjoyed to a point but also lost my interest before I finished it.
Without my ever drawing the connection, in many ways Reventure is one of the types of games I have been thinking of turning Marloth into.