---
title: "The Rogue Fable"
subtitle: "A comprehensive, deterministic roguelike with great character development and dungeons to delve in to."
date: 2016-01-29T00:00:00.000Z
category: game
url: https://phaser.io/news/2016/01/the-rogue-fable
site: Phaser - https://phaser.io
copyright: © 2026 Phaser Studio Inc. All rights reserved.
---

# The Rogue Fable

*A comprehensive, deterministic roguelike with great character development and dungeons to delve in to.*

![image](the-rogue-fable1.png)

Developer Justin Wang posted this great rogue-like game to the Phaser Forum: "Hi everyone! I've just completed my second attempt at a browser roguelike game and would love some feedback from fellow developers. Some thoughts that went into designing this game:

**Deterministic:**

The game is almost completely deterministic. Weapons always hit, all damage is constant (though mitigated by armor and resistances), healing recovers a set amount of hit points etc. I placed both the remaining hit points and damage directly on enemy sprites as I want players to know exactly what will happen in the next turn. In general I've tried to make the game as tactical as possible with the player given perfect information regarding the state of the game and the results of his actions.

![image](the-rogue-fable2.png)

**No Health or Mana Regeneration:**

The player either needs to consume items in his inventory or consume resources in the level to regenerate mana and health.

**Character Development:**

I've tried to strike a balance between allowing the player to define his character build and allowing the RNG to define it for him. The items in you find are the major way in which your character build is defined with skills playing a lesser role. Furthermore I included shops so that the player has some control over which items he carries. I intentionally made the inventory small in order to force players to drop or sell items that don't contribute to the strategy he's developing. I hope that each play through players will assess the sort of drops their getting and develop a unique character development strategy for that run. In this way each run should be unique.

![image](the-rogue-fable3.png)

**No Useless Items:**

Even though players will generally be specializing in some variation of melee, ranged, caster or stealth build, I wanted all items to always be useful. For example when a scroll is used, if the player has sufficient mana, then only mana is consumed, otherwise the scroll is consumed. In this way I hope that non caster characters will still feel it useful to carry around scrolls for emergencies. As a counter example, mana is balanced in such a way that casters cannot endlessly fling spells around but must rely on melee or thrown weapons to deal with trash monsters.

![image](the-rogue-fable4.png)

**Multiple Effects:**

I tried to make most items and spells have multiple effects. Healing potions can be drunk at full hp to increase maximum hit points, food also restores health, fire spells can ignite vines, ice spells also freeze enemies in place. There is generally no best weapon type: swords hit multiple enemies, pole arms have increased range, daggers can back stab unaware enemies. Heavier armor reduces maximum mana.

![image](the-rogue-fable5.png)

**Feedback:**

Any feedback is greatly appreciated. Until now I've focused mainly on small games with procedurally generated levels. For my next project I plan to use this games character development, combat and general gameplay as base on which to build a more extensive role playing game with hand crafted levels, NPCs, dialog and quests, so feedback will be informing my next project as well as this one."

[Play Game](http://www.html5gamedevs.com/topic/19956-phaser-the-rogue-fable/)

---

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