Game Design Deep Dive: Roguelikes examines the history and rise of the often-confusing roguelike genre. Despite being over 30 years old, the roguelike genre remains a mystery to a lot of consumers and developers. Procedural generation, or having the game generate content, has been a cornerstone and point of complexity since its inception. The 2010’s saw an explosion of new designs and examples, along with a debate about what is a roguelike. The genre found its way back to mainstream audiences with the award-winning Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls, and since then, roguelikes have revolutionized the way we see and design games. Author and Game Design Critic, Joshua Bycer will explain to the reader the differences of the various roguelike designs and give a detailed blueprint as to what makes the best ones work. The first of its kind talking about the roguelike genre Examining the design and methodology of roguelike games and the different variations A high-level discussion and breakdown of procedural and random content generation Joshua Bycer is a Game Design Critic with more than 7 years of experience critically analyzing game design and the industry itself. In that time through Game-Wisdom, he has interviewed hundreds of game developers and members of the industry about what it means to design video games. He is also a public speaker and presenter at schools and libraries on game design and game development.