Streets Of Rogue creator wants to ramp up the carnage with a sequel
Street sweeper
Streets Of Rogue let you get away with some pretty daft stuff. Want to make a profit on the zombie apocalypse? Sorted. Feel like possessing the clone of a scientist to kill his genetic source? Gotcha. But developer Matt Dabrowski reckons there's even more mayhem he can throw into the Streets Of Rogue blender, and has announced plans for a sequel to deliver just that. After all, what if you could fit those five bloodthirsty gorillas in a truck?
The folks down in the RPS treehouse (or their respective branches wot with the lockdown and all) liked themselves a bit of Streets Of Rogue. A wildly systemic roguelikelike in a procedural tower full of shrink rays, werewolves and black market McNuggets, Brendy called it "a small and cheerful antidote to the relatively plain-faced immersive sims of the blockbuster sort" in his Streets Of Rogue review. We reckon it's one of the best co-op games you can play on PC.
Posting in an update announcement for version 88 (itself largely a collection of bug-fixes), Dabrowski noted that new features for Streets Of Rogue are in the pipeline. But to go further, Dabrowski reckons he'll have to make a whole new game, building from the tech base he's established over the last half-decade.
"Streets Of Rogue has now been in development for over six years, with the game being playable from start to finish for nearly two years. It's become more and more difficult to add new features to the game that are impactful, but won’t break the existing game or fundamentally change the gameplay. I'd like to take Streets Of Rogue in some big new directions, but it’s tough to do so within the current structural confines of the game I've created."
Now, Dabrowski doesn't expect to have anything to show for a good while yet. For the time being, he plans to “experiment with new tech and toy around with new systems”, as he figures out what Streets Of Rogue 2 (or whatever it ends up calling itself) ends up looking like.
Breaking away from the Streets Of Rogue base may let him take some dramatic steps, mind, as his post toys with the idea of vehicles or shifting to an open-world structure - and while his focus will be shifting towards the sequel, improvements to the engine may find their way back into the original release.
For the most part, though, it sounds like any sequel will be largely iterative - more of the same, but bigger and (hopefully) better. But hey, if that means Matt can continue his supersized gorilla rampage, or let Nate watch a wrestler turn a man into paste with a turbo-charged leaf-blower, that's fine by us.
After all, what's another totally normal day in Streets Of Rogue?