Game breakdown: Hoplite

Hoplite is a little gem of a #game created by indie game developer Magma Fortress, originally for the 2013 7DRL Challenge. This will be a #breakdown as well as an experience #critique (~eight years late, but better late than never!).

These are the main goals:

Table of contents:

  1. Introduction
  2. Game base
  3. Breakdown
  4. Experience
  5. Conclusion

Introduction

Hoplite is a turn-based strategy game and can be called a mini-roguelike, among various other terms – roguelike-like or roguelite. What this means is that it shares characteristics with more full-fledged roguelike games.

The player controls the titular hoplite and must navigate hexagonal-tile grids with lava which are set in the underworld (each level is called a depth), battling / avoiding enemies along the way, making a path towards the only exit in every depth. As a respite from this morbid premise, the hoplite can pick up new prayers (abilities) from an altar in every depth, which for instance increase health or improve existing attacks, helping the hoplite get through. The main quest is to recover the Fleece of Yendor (a nod to Rogue's Amulet of Yendor), which is found at depth 16, and return home. Players who have the complete game can continue further down (up to depth 1000?! I believe) after picking up the Fleece, have access to a ton of challenges and can complete achievements (which mostly unlock new abilities).

According to the developer's game webpage,

Hoplite is a turn-based strategy game focusing on tactical movement around small maps.

The game features roguelike gameplay elements such as procedural generation and permadeath while avoiding the traditional roguelike “bump-to-attack” combat in favour of movement based attacks.

Game base

Let us unpack this ^ brief of the game.

  1. It is a turn-based strategy game, meaning actions are not asynchronous / real-time between you the player and the opponents (enemies). Each and every action of the player and the enemy (taken as a unit) is synchronous (ordered) – you make your move, and the enemies together make their move the next turn. There is no time constraint involved for the player's turns in the game.
  2. The game's maps (levels) are procedurally generated. Such a game can potentially create a huge (too large to even comprehend) number of levels. If we take the rather bad analogy of Sudoku, we have 5472730538 essentially different grids that can exist. This means that levels leverage algorithms to generate game data. This is further explained below.
  3. When you die, you do not respawn or continue from the current or previous level. You stay dead, in the traditional permadeath style of roguelikes. The game needs a true restart, without any abilities or experience that was previously acquired.
  4. The combat of Hoplite avoids the usual “bump-to-attack” mechanism of most roguelikes- where the player attacks / destroys an enemy by bumping into them. It instead uses movement-based combat in a hexagonal grid, meaning that the position of the player after a move determines the attack (attempt) result.

Note: Before reading further, I highly recommend playing the game enough to win the main quest and think about the game mechanics. And have some fun. Beating the main quest is mostly proof that the core game is well understood. If you want to know more only on the playability of the game, skip to the Experience section below.

Breakdown

Hoplite is a wonderful game to analyse and think about- it has solid (and concise) level design and game mechanics, is set with rules / constraints and when it comes to playing, it presents a great example of balance in terms of learning and mastering. This section will be a mix of mechanics, rules and behaviours.

Character and enemy movement

Hoplite's levels are called depths and are set in the underworld. Each depth is made of exactly 79 hexagonal tiles, which may be navigable (land) or non-navigable (lava). The depth in itself is in the shape of a hexagon.

The player can move to any one of the surrounding 6 tiles directly, or leap to any one of the outer-surrounding 12 tiles. There can potentially be more tiles to move to, unlocked by abilities picked up later in the game. Enemies do not have to be dealt with, but if they are, the player can move to the alter / exit directly, taking the shortest path.

Enemy movement varies with the type of demon:

Generally, all enemies try to move closer to you (sometimes effectively closing you in without space to move), and try to optimize their chances of successfully attacking you. Their varied movement and attack patterns ensure that the gameplay is always exciting, and is complex enough to enjoy every single time.

Procedural generation

The brain of the game- how every depth is generated is truly a difficult piece of work to craft from scratch. Randomness is the key term here. Every depth in Hoplite is different each time you play it: this is an essential feature for such a game to keep it fresh every time you play.

There are several instances where algorithms must be put to use here:

Character abilities

The hoplite has 3 main moves at his arsenal: bash, leap and spear.

Apart from those, the simplest attack of the hoplite is the humble single tile stab (aside from a possible lunge) move in any one of the six surrounding tiles- enemies that are adjacent to the hoplite before and after the move are killed. The planning of moves by attack type, order of turns, resources (energy, cooldown) and end result (prediction of depth after the move) is important. As the game progresses, every single move becomes the ultimate decision-maker; one move can win or lose you the depth.

Upgrades and builds

Praying at the altar can give you new abilities / augment your existing skills. These altars appear on every depth upto and including the 15th, after which new prayers cannot be made. Every altar offers a selection of upgrades from which you can choose one. Some abilities require the sacrifice of a spare life or two. And others require achievements to be unlocked first.

If the upgrades were to be categorised:

The multitude of such upgrades allows for interesting builds for our hoplite, and there may be optimal builds for specific strategies. Although balanced builds may seem tempting (you get the best of all abilities), a reasonably balanced build + a particular niche imbalance works best (as it is with many other games).

A few examples:

Deterministic Play

I have not tested this, but based on general behaviour of games and my play experience with Hoplite, here's a guess of the expected behaviour: every depth in Hoplite can be won, although that win may at times require exactly one and only one specific solution.

The game is deterministic, i.e. once the level and enemies are generated per depth, what follows (the player's actions and subsequent enemy actions and results) has a predictable/known output for the input (player move). Maybe determinism is a trivial and obvious fact, but I find it interesting to talk about. The game, unbound by time constraints or physical dexterity / reaction time instead relies on slow and steady skill- much like standard Sudoku.

Aside from the game being deterministic (like chess), I assume the win is deterministic in the sense that there exists at least one win condition to complete every depth, as it should be ideally. The win condition can be one or many, depending on the depth, player abilities and enemies, but the fact that you can win every depth is assured. This is usually a given in procedurally generated roguelikes. However, with later depths, future upgrades and abilities, I think that the possibilities are too complex, and perhaps this is quite hard to implement. For example, the attack pattern of the demolitionist might make this property impossible (especially in the later depths), but for now we shall assume it holds.

Experience

Hoplite is straightforward fun. It plays great, contains lots of builds and upgrades to discover and unlock, and it offers great replay value. I thought it had neat pixel graphics when I first downloaded it from the Play Store. The screenshots along with the high rating made it a no-brainer. Here I highlight the major points of player experience from my perspective.

Tutorial

Game feel

Once the player embarks upon the Quest for the Fleece, the game is golden. I recovered the Fleece in approx. 3 hours of play for the first time, and immediately purchased the full version. Before playing the game I thought that it would be “rigid” in rules and outcomes, with little “dynamism”. Although it has deterministic play, Hoplite unmistakably possesses a true roguelike feel to it: the inclusion of different abilities (and their combinations), permadeath and randomness, along with many other important game mechanics add to the dynamism of the game.

Difficulty

Hoplite is fairly difficult for a beginner, but not difficult enough to put down. It is interesting enough to figure out the game mechanics and by the time one finishes the original quest (depth 16), I am sure they will quickly develop a feverish addiction (gamers in particular). Also the fact that you can pick it up right where you left it last time is great.

The inspect option along with being able to see the lines of attack are useful learning the game as well as later. The variety of game mechanics and different combinations of enemies, attacks, abilities/upgrades can produce endless possibilities. Depth 17 is like the second start of the game (unless you are trying to do Atheist), after which the game is immensely fun, largely because of the complete set of abilities now at your disposal, along with the healing Fleece.

Replayability

The game offers great variety to keep things interesting:

Conclusion

It is important to keep in mind that this write-up is from personal experience and is just my opinion (playability section). Purely for the love of game design & dev, and Hoplite. This is also my first attempt at doing this, for any game.

Again, Hoplite is a little gem of a game I am glad to have found. Once the game mechanics are understood, it steadily grows on you. I think, with the growing deluge of mobile games, Hoplite is simply one of the best I have played. And it's quite rare to strike a good balance between casual and serious gameplay, as well as the learning/mastering ratio.

Thank you Magma Fortress!

If you want to learn more about the game, head over to the r/Hoplite subreddit. It contains some great tips on playing effectively and a build maker spreadsheet, among other interesting questions.

Official video here You can download the game here – Android / iOS