BioShock Successor Judas Is A Procedurally Generated Roguelite
Bioshock creator Ken Levine’s Judas has been in development for almost ten years, and now his studio Ghost Story Games are finally ready to show what its been working on all that time. While Judas is still a narrative-driven FPS in the style of the Bioshock games, it’s also a procedurally generated roguelite set in a dynamically-shifting open world. Here’s what we know so far.
Judas is fundamentally built around a concept Ken Levine calls “narrative Legos,” which he has been refining since his GDC talk by the same name all the way back in 2014. The concept mixes procedural generation with bespoke building blocks of narrative or dialogue, creating a game that can react to a player’s decisions in a way that feels natural.
“We call it pseudo-procedural because it’s not like Minecraft where everything’s being generated off a set of pure mathematical heuristics,” Levine explained in an interview with IGN. “You build all these smaller piece elements in the game and then you teach the game how to make good levels essentially, and good story, and most importantly, reactive to what you do.”