Rogue Legacy announced

Teddy Lee of Cellar Door Games writes in to tell me about Rogue Legacy, a side-scrolling “geneological” action roguelike-like with permadeath and an interesting character generation system.

The premise:

You are entering a castle for reasons unknown (to the player).  When you die, your children avenge you. This goes on for a couple hundred years. (couple thousand if you suck).

I say “character generation” rather than “character creation” because you don’t have a say in your characters’ attributes; the game randomizes them for you. This is where the “geneological” part comes in:

When you die, you die for good.  You will be avenged by your children.  Each child is born with different genetic traits.  So one child could be colour-blind, and another might have tourettes.  Or you could be born with dwarfism.  Along with this, each child has a class preference.  So it’s not up to the player, they must accommodate the game instead.  As you progress in the castle, when you die, whatever treasure you found is brought back home which you can spend upgrading your manor.  Giving each child a step up on the others.

As in any roguelike (or roguelike-like), the world is procedurally generated anew every time you start a new character. You can see how this all fits together in the game’s trailer:

Rogue Legacy will be released on June 27th. If you can’t bear to wait the whole week until release, you can wet your beak with the game’s free demo. You can also pre-order the game for $10 via the Humble Store. (The price will rise to $15 tomorrow, so pre-ordering now will save you about 33%.)

Rogue Legacy is currently for Windows. Per the developer, “Mac and Linux builds will arrive a little later.”