Though there’s certainly a glut of Roguelike, Rogue-lite, and wannabe Rogue-lite titles on the market, few games embrace the concept of procedural generation to quite the same extent as Streets of Rogue and its upcoming sequel do. That is precisely what the developer Matt Dabrowski’s latest developer vlog focuses on.
The sheer scope and ridiculousness of the original Streets of Rogue was very impressive back in the day, allowing players to, say, smash buildings wide open as a giant gorilla. You could also be a jock, an investment banker, or a shapeshifter just to list a few character classes, each allowing you to tackle the game’s many proc-generated objectives however you see fit. Streets of Rogue 2, however, amps up the concept by a substantial margin, as Dabrowski aptly explains in his latest 18-minute vlog.
Streets of Rogue 2’s procedural generation makes the original game look ridiculously simple
As Dabrowski himself puts it, Streets of Rogue 2 is supposed to be “stupidly ambitious” by design, with the game generating a living and breathing open-world region that is “more than 10,000 times the size” of one of the first game’s levels. That’s… quite the claim, certainly. Especially because Streets of Rogue leans heavily on its immersive sim-adjacent features to fuel player exploration. Thankfully, in the new vlog, Dabrowski provides context as to how this is all works in practice
“As I found,” Dabrowski explains, “it’s actually very easy to create a lot of randomized content for your game using procedural generation. What’s more difficult and time-consuming is creating content that’s fun and balanced and interesting and not just, like, a random, jumbled, dull mess.”
In the video, Dabrowski goes in-depth on how Streets of Rogue 2 tackles this issue, and why he is convinced the game will prove to be a meaningful evolution over the original title. Broadly, Streets of Rogue 2 features a huge array of procedural generation systems that should provide players with effectively infinite variety in gameplay, going so far as to generate entire cities and the content between them. The real spice, however, is in Dabrowski’s “chunks” of content and hand-crafted goodies strewn throughout the game world.
“Each type of region in the game has its own individual algorithm for chunk placements, and some of them are really complicated,” Dabrowski says, adding that the cities themselves will be particularly complex, as they’ll allow the players to basically enter any building and do whatever they want. In that sense, Streets of Rogue 2 might end up being somewhat similar to the old bird’s eye view Grand Theft Auto games, which is a fascinating prospect.
In theory, there’s nothing necessarily paradigm-shifting about Streets of Rogue 2‘s approach to procedural generation, but the in-depth showcase video featured above makes the whole thing seem extremely true to what the original title might’ve strived for. If nothing else, Dabrowski’s video provides a good look at how a developer might implement proc-gen into their own game, making it a must-see for the more technically inclined gamers.
