The tabletop-inspired mechanics of deckbuilding and dice-rolling at a semblance of curation to the randomness of this roguelike.

As We Descend is an upcoming roguelike deckbuilding game that incorporates elements from strategy games.

Actually, you won’t believe where it started–it was a 4X roguelike deckbuilder.

As you descend further, you’ll build your ideal deck.

So it was very siege-like–non-violent–and I tried so many wild ideas.

I even have an old build of the game.

I’ll show you sometime.

Each unit archetype features different weapons and decks, so you can curate several different combat decks.

It’s the funniest thing.

It looks like Dwarf Fortress.

…It did just keep moving closer to tabletop unintentionally.

As We Descend is pretty brutal so you’ll lose units if you don’t play strategically.

So [tech director] Karl [Bergstrom] and I co-founded the studio together.

We used to work at Stunlock Studios.

This was back in 2020.

You’ll often be summoned to speak with important members of the city and make choices in how you interact with them.

I’m a game designer and Karl’s a programmer.

We can land a good game, but can we make it look amazing?

So we leaned more into it–I would say that is probably the biggest impetus for change.

I don’t think it was even a tabletop or roguelike thing.

It was more like, ‘What is the potential of the studio and sort of the team potential?’

and we wanted to just lean into it more.

You have to move a bunch of troops.

…As We Descend is all about making choices and pivoting the whole time.

We don’t want that feeling to go away.

So that’s been there from the start.

I think nowadays people expect unlockables in roguelikes.

You get more ways to interface with [the game] as you play more.

You get to customize it more, but the game doesn’t necessarily get easier for you.

And the skill checks for talking with people warms my little TTRPG-loving heart.

Before that, it was a very, very impersonal city.

I kept arguing with other people, being like, ‘Hey, we have to include this.

We have to put the lore text in.

We have to make these characters good.

We have to make you care about the characters here.’

How do these fleshed-out characters inform the characterization of the protagonist?

How far can a player stress the protagonist’s morals in defense of the city?

They’ll never give you a choice where he does something out of character.

There are quite a few origin stories for your character.

You are not actually the dictator that’s at the top or the authoritarian [voice].

There’s so many other things that bind you in this game to your responsibility.

It is not like we’re doing a dating simulator or anything like that.

This interview was edited for both brevity and readability.

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