I’ve been diving into the world of roguelike games lately, and As We Descend by Box Dragon caught my attention with its mix of strategy and deckbuilding.
In this game, you take on the role of a senior city leader, tasked with protecting your home from monsters and fixing broken tech. You collect and upgrade cards to guide your actions, adding a twist of randomness to the challenge of defending your city. As your city slowly sinks into the planet, you uncover secrets of a world long past. Every time you fail, you return to the city in a different era, building on what’s left from the past.
Before the demo launched, I got to play and chat with Kevin Chang, the game’s director. The game’s art and storytelling pulled me in, and figuring out the right card combos to defeat demons was a blast. Our talk explored Chang’s tabletop gaming background, how the game captures the excitement of a Civilization game start, and how its story elements almost didn’t exist.
Did you start this project with a tabletop game in mind and then add roguelike elements, or was it the other way around?
Chang: It’s kind of like asking which came first, the chicken or the egg. I wanted to create a solid roguelike game from the start. Funny enough, it began as a 4X roguelike deckbuilder. It was more about strategy than fighting, and I experimented with many ideas. I have an old version of the game that I’ll show you. It’s like a command prompt with mouse-and-keyboard support and a hex grid for playing. It’s quite amusing, like Dwarf Fortress.
…The game naturally leaned towards tabletop elements. We wanted it to be strategic and replayable, but people craved more action and excitement. Finding our art director, Aleks Nikonov, was key. He used to work at Riot Games, and once we had him, we knew the game could look incredible. Karl and I founded the studio, having worked at Stunlock Studios before. This was in 2020.
Fans love when games look amazing!
In summer 2020, we hired Aleks, and his talent made us realize we could make the game visually stunning. Karl is a programmer, and I’m a designer, so we could create a fun game, but not necessarily a beautiful one. With Aleks, we leaned into the potential of our team, aiming to create something truly spectacular.
Why choose a roguelike’s cyclical nature to tell a story, unlike traditional tabletop or strategy games?
In strategy games like Civilization, the late game can become a slog. After turn 200 or more, managing countless units and cities becomes tiresome. It’s like handling a huge empire, but it feels like busywork. As We Descend aims to capture the magic of the first moments of a game, where every decision is exciting and impactful.
…As We Descend focuses on constant decision-making and adaptation. We want players to always feel engaged, and unlockables are a big part of that. Players today expect unlockables in roguelikes.
I’m a fan of challenging content and offering new ways to interact with the game. It’s more like a sandbox, where playing doesn’t make the game easier but offers more choices and strategies. It might even get tougher as you learn and unlock more options.
The narrative elements of As We Descend are probably my favorite part of the game–I like how they inform and characterize the city. And the skill checks for talking with people warms my little TTRPG-loving heart.
We’ve only had strong, narrative-driven characters for the past seven months I want to say, maybe eight months.
Wait, what?
Yeah. 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.’ I kept impressing upon them the sort of urgency I felt of that mission because, without that intimacy of just caring about the city, [As We Descend] does become just yet another strategy game where you don’t give a f***–the troops die and it’s whatever, and there are no stakes there, but sure, let’s pretend there are stakes, [and if] you lose the city and you die off, it’s whatever. That’s not the same as something like a Frostpunk or a Hades where you know the characters, you care about their stories and their journeys and that adds a lot more meaning to the game.
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?
I want [choices] to matter but not in a morality system way, which I think is a bit shallow… I think a good character to talk about is actually Geralt from The Witcher because he always makes Geralt-like decisions no matter what–the game only offers you Geralt-like decisions for all the pathways. They’ll never give you a choice where he does something out of character. So I think it’s going to actually be similar here where your character will never act completely out of character, but you will be able to choose within the framework you’re given.
There are quite a few origin stories for your character. You come from one of the three great houses that inhabit the city, and you can choose what your origin is, what ally you start with, and there might be some additional sub-choices within that. But the goal is [to make you] always this person who is thrust into this position of power, being a warden of the wall. You are not actually the dictator that’s at the top or the authoritarian [voice]. I think that’s such an overdone thing in strategy games, but I also think it misses the topic a little. It doesn’t let us introspect into this idea about being at the whims of something much greater than yourself–it plays into this fantasy of being like an authoritarian sandbox. You get to just dictate as you please, and I think [As We Descend] is not a game where you get [that fantasy]. There’s so many other things that bind you in this game to your responsibility.
So within that framework, you’ll get to make choices that matter, and I hope that when you play later versions of this game, that it really does feel like whatever you choose, you are giving yourself a character by the choices you make, but I don’t want it to be in a character creation way or a, ‘you get to define these things’ [way]. It is not like we’re doing a dating simulator or anything like that. You’ll reflect who you are through your character’s choices, and I want the story to be able to reflect as much of that as possible.
This interview was edited for both brevity and readability.
