Preface

I originally wrote this article back in 2021 as a design excercise, after an industry mentee suggested that a good way of improving my portfolio was to demonstrate knowledge of systems through an analysis piece where I retroengineered an existing game.

I chose Darkest Dungeon as the focus of this analysis. My objective was then to understand Darkest Dungeon’s systems by breaking them down to its singular parts and rearranging them back together through a Systemic Approach.

I never finished the article, my analysis kind of stops at the interesting bit (talking about Darkest Dungeon, lol) and doesn’t lead to a satisfying conclusion, but the introduction is still valuable for aspiring designers to find and read as an example of how to conduct a systemic analysis of a game.

Enjoy!

Introduction

In this article I will provide a systemic re-view of Darkest Dungeon in an attempt to retroengineer how all the systems work together to create its dynamics of play.

What are systems and how do we evaluate them?

Before delving deeper into the game’s systems I want to define some concepts to create a shared understanding of the way I think about games.

Talking about games adpoting a systemic approach is extremely challenging because systems, unlike the language we are using to analyze them, are not linear. They can’t be understood just through the snapshot that their fixed expression in language conveys, they need to be lived!

How can we go around talking about systems if we don’t have them in front of us, then? Well, this is what a Game Designer needs to be extremely good at, as they try to communicate games as systems to their team mates even before these systems exist in any concrete form: we then rely on examples from other games, diagrams, moodboards, real life scenarios. As we will be talking about an already existing game all the examples we need are front of us, but some diagramming and further breaking down of what constitutes systems in games can help us.

Micheal Sellers (2017) provides my favourite definition of systems that I will continue to refer to throghout this article: systems are created by interconnected parts that together form cycles of interaction for the emergence of a whole. This whole has its own properties and components that only exists because of these interactions. What I also find useful for our examination is the systemic model provided by Sellers, which disassembles games into three layers:

Structural parts: the immutable components of the game that have been explicitly created by the developers, the tokens and rules like the game world, the character sprites or the actual code that defines the damage of a certain weapon and its behaviours
Functional aspects: the systems that emerge from the interactions between the structural parts and of which the player needs to be able to create a mental model in order to play the game. These are what the MDA model calls Dynamics (Hunicke, Leblanc, Zubek, 2004): a combat system, an inventory system, a climbing system, a progression system and so on
Architectural and Thematic aspects: these are two sides of the same coin and consistutes the game as a whole perceived by the Designer (architectural) and the player (thematic). An architectural aspect of a game could be its balancing system, a thematic aspect gives context to the actions of the player by establishing a fantasy

Games then are a just a series of parts (sprites, weapons, abilities) that create systems (combat, economy, climbing) that convey themes (survival, madness, friendship).

Pretty cool, but I also want to briefly explain why these systems matter to us.

To put it simply, we play to learn. We are seekers of knowledge, as many theories of game design support (Koster, 2004; Cook, 2021), and systems are the perfect space to learn deep lessons about scarcity, information complexity, efficiency and more (Armitage, 2008) in a way that cannot really be done anywhere else. The core loop of most games consist of:

Some form of input from the player
The observation of the effects of the input in the system
The development of a mental model of the system
Repeat

The mental model of a system is the understanding that a person has of that system. In the case of a game a player’s mental model might include knowing what is the goal of the game, what resources they should seek and where to find them, which weapons are the strongest and what a weapon being “strong” means, how to move, interact with objects or how previous choices influence the current state of the game

“Games require us to grapple with multiple complex systems (even when they’re hidden). Playing a game involves observing the behaviour of systems, making a mental model of them, and predicting how they will react to new input.“
Gallant, 2018

“Playing games requires a kind of systems literacy that no other medium demands – to understand rules and patterns, and to learn them on the fly.” – Eriz Zimmerman
Armitage, 2008

This is why we play and the way I will evaluate the Darkest Dungeon’s systems is in correspondence to these fundamental beliefs: do they allow the player to create a consistent mental model of the game? what are they trying to teach? and what theme are they trying to convey? Plus, I will be keeping in mind Daniel Achterman’s (2011) five major qualities of systems:

Comprehensibility: the ease with which the player can create a mental model of the system
Consistency: the presence of exceptional rules, the breaking of established rules
Predictablity: the level of predictability of a system mostly matters in terms of the strategies that the player is able to elaborate and how far they can see into the future of the system
Extendibility: the ease with which new content and behaviours can be added to the game
Elegancy: the simplicity of the design, the creation of emergent behaviour, the metastability of the system

But let’s not wait any further, it’s time to adventure into the systems of Darkest Dungeon!

Understanding the Theme

To begin, let’s understand what Darkest Dungeon is about as a whole. The game is a gothic RPG developed by Red Hook Games and released on the 16th of January, 2016, it’s loved by the community for its challenging and punishing gameplay with high stakes and high rewards. With just a little research we can understand the goal that led the developers to the creation of the game: the emotional pillar of the experience is the concept that in reality heroes wouldn’t be famous and wealthy personalities, they would be miserable people scarred for life by their experiences of fighting monsters day in and day out. They would live a life that is not worth living and than no one would be jealous of because of the continous stress they would be exposed to, and that is what the game is all about: what are the dynamics of leading a team into increasingly stressful situations? To fit the design, the developers wanted the experience to often feel unfair to the player and pushed for extremely indeterministic dynamics that have equally extreme consequences and don’t restrain from taking away the player’s most valuable things without even flinching, purposefully breaking the rules of classic game design and spitting in the face of agency and loss aversion in the name of eliciting stress. The hook of their game is the affliction system, which causes your heroes to become afflicted with insanity after being exposed to too much stress.

“It was very important for Darkest Dungeon that you were not in control […], we knew it would frustrate the heck out of you some times […] but this was a necessity for the “Hero are Humans” idea“
Tyler Sigman, Game Director (GDC, 2017b)

Darkest Dungeon then sets itself up to be an unconventional game on the wave of other masochistic experiences that have seen a grand return in popularity in the last decade, following the principles of what Derek Yu calls “Spiky Design“: games that use diffculty or other purposefully unpleasurable design notions to force the player into a definite behaviour with the goal of putting them into a state of deep flow and high emotional engagement with the systems (GDC, 2021).

“I’m a huge masochist, so when I make games like these… this is how I want to be treated!“
Hidetaka Miyazaki, Dark Souls’ Creative Director (Game No Shokutaku Interview, n.d.)

Check the GDC talks (2017a, 2017b) and The Escapist’s videos (2020a, 2020b) for the source of these arguments.

A simple surface

After understanding what the game is trying to accomplish, let’s actually take a closer look at how Darkest Dungeon works on paper: we will look at all the supporting systems of the game to expose their surprising simplicity, this understanding will later help us understand how the hook of the game can live on top of these systems for the creation of something unique.

The core loop of Darkest Dungeon is extremely simple and straightforward: you assemble a party of heroes and adventure into dungeons to fight monsters, gather loop and XP; with the resources gathered in the dungeon you can slowly improve the strength of your heroes until they’re capable of handling tougher challenges. Repeat until your heroes are strong enough to defeat the final dungeon of the game, the Darkest Dungeon. This then divides the game into two sections: management and dungeon crawling. The first is played in the village, where you can use buildings to hire new heroes or tend to your units by reducing their debuffs, unlocking and improving their skills or upgrading their equipment. The second is played in the dungeon, where you’ll send your units to fight. This is the most important section of the game and the developers subdivide it into Exploring, Fighting and Camping (GDC, 2017b).

Game Economy

The economy of the game is also criminally simple: the two major types of loots in the games are gold and heirlooms. Gold can be spent in any of these four ways:

Unlocking or upgrading abilities and equipment for each hero
Treating stress, sickness or quirks, recovering heroes after battle
Purchasing trinkets
Purchasing dungeon provisions

Heirlooms are slightly more sophisticated. They consist of four types of currency: busts, portraits, deeds and crests, each one of them is primarily found in dungeons.

Heirlooms have only one purpose: to improve the village buildings, allowing you to further increase the speed at which units can level up or make their recovery after battle more efficient, which in turn increases the amount of units you can handle at once, tightening the core loop over time.

Heirlooms are the resource for what Michael Sellers (2017) defines a Boosting Engine: the system grants the player resources through combat and rewards, these can then be spent to gain more resources in the future, meaning that the more heirlooms the player spends on buildings the stronger heroes will be able to become and the faster it will be to reach those peaks of strength. In the late game then, even if the player loses all its units, it will not be as hard as the first time to progress new units to higher levels thanks to the upgraded buildings. You can clearly see this in the graph below: adventure in the dungeon once by clicking up on Adventure pool and notice how this starts a reinforcing loop that speeds things up on the whole scale. The outer loop takes longer to bare fruit as resources need to be converted into benefits over time and often these benefits are also beneficial on the long term, but they sure make the difference.

Unfortunately, heirlooms have no other use after all the buildings have been upgraded. Its clear that the village economy is just a mean to an end for the game and the developers have done a good job in keeping it comprehensible, consistent, predictable and elegant. The evidence of this is given to us directly by Creative Director Chris Bourassa, who establishes the idea that “our game is about the sword arm, not the sword” (GDC, 2017a, minute 16:00), meaning that this system was not the focus of the experience. It also also fairly extendible as showcased by the release of the Crimson Court DLC, which heavily expanded the village economy of the game by adding completely new buildings with unique behaviours that revolutionized the tempo of the game’s core loop.

Injecting variation

Now we will get into the meat of what makes Darkest Dungeon a memorable experience: the thematic elements of madness, fear and hopelessness and the way they are conveyed through systems.

The Affliction System

The main selling point of Darkest Dungeon’s theme is that it’s a set in a gruesome world where heroes are not triumphant figures full of fame and wealth: their dungeon crawling has exposed them to unimaginable horrors and therefore made them miserable. Your units are more like pawns, faceless adventurers sent to die in the dark tunnels of the dungeon. Now, the way the designers chose to represent this theme is through the notorious affliction system: during expeditions your heroes will be exposed to stressful events, which will increase their stress bar. When this bar reached 100 the character’s resolve will be tested and this is where they will likely be afflicted by a random set of desperate behaviour: they will become fearful, paranoid, selfish, masochistic, abusive, hopeless, irrational, raptorous or refracted. All of these states come with their bonuses and maluses in stats, but most importantly they all largely take the character out of your control: they will start to refuse to move, skip their turns, decline healing, abuse their companions and/or act indipendently all together.

First of all, this system functions as a Breaking Engine (Sellers, 2017) in a way that is not much different from other negative feedback loops like stamina or AP in any other game: the more you send an hero into the dungeon the more their stress will accumulate and the lesser they will be able to adventure again without properly seeking treatment first.

Temptation

If the player leaves the dungeon (even with only one hero alive and even before completing the mission) all the gold obtained will be kept by the player. This mechanic taps into the player’s desire for safety and reward, tempting them to retreat when things get tough rather than risk losing everything by pressing on. It’s a clever addition that adds a layer of strategic decision-making to each expedition, as players must weigh the potential gains against the risk of losing their heroes or valuable loot. This temptation aligns with the overarching theme of the game, reinforcing the idea that in the face of overwhelming adversity, even the bravest adventurers may succumb to the allure of self-preservation.

Conclusion

The systemic analysis of Darkest Dungeon reveals the intricate balance between its structural, functional, and thematic aspects. The game’s systems, ranging from its economy to the affliction system, are designed with a clear purpose: to immerse players in a harrowing journey through stress, fear, and hopelessness. The simplicity and elegance of its economy serve as a foundation for the game’s core loop, while the affliction system injects variation and tension, challenging players to navigate the psychological toll of dungeon crawling. Through clever mechanics and economy design, Darkest Dungeon reinforces its thematic premise, prompting players to confront the harsh realities of adventuring in a brutal world.

Ultimately, Darkest Dungeon succeeds not only as a challenging RPG but also as a masterclass in leveraging game systems to convey a compelling and immersive experience of despair and perseverance.

And in conclusion, here is a graph that ties together most systems in the game (with approximations, of course):

Stuff To Read

Resources

Daniel Achterman (2011). The Craft of Game Systems: General Guidelines [Online] Available at https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/128271/The_Craft_of_Game_Systems_General_Guidelines.php (Accessed: 6 July 2021)

Sellers, M. (2017) Advanced game design: a systems approach. Boston: Addison-Wesley.

Game Maker’s Toolkit (2016) Morality in the Mechanics. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RHH7M4siPM (Accessed: 16 December 2021).

Hunicke, R., Leblanc, M., Zubek, R. (2004). MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research.

Cook, D. (2021). The Chemistry Of Game Design [Online]. Available at: https://lostgarden.home.blog/2021/03/13/the-chemistry-of-game-design-2/ (Accessed: 22 May 2021)

Koster, R. (2004) A Theory of Fun for Game Design. Paraglyph Press.

Gallant, M. (2018). Thinking In Systems. [Online] Available at: http://gangles.ca/2018/07/09/thinking-in-systems/ (Accessed: 04 May 2021)

Armitage, T. (2008). If Gamers Ran The World. [Online] Available at: https://infovore.org/talks/if-gamers-ran-the-world/ (Accessed: 04 May 2021)

Yu, D. (2021) One More Run:The Making of ‘Spelunky 2’. [Online] Available at: https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1027187/Independent-Games-Summit-One-More (Accessed: 4 September 2021)

Howell, P. (2016). A theoretical framework of ludic knowledge: a case study in disruption and cognitive engagement. Available at: https://pocg2016.institutedigitalgames.com/site/assets/files/1015/howell_-_a_theoretical_framework_of_ludic_knowledge.pdf (Accessed: 01 July 2021)

GDC (2017a) A Torch in the Dark: Using Creative Direction to Light The Darkest Dungeon. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4ETK1C1KNs (Accessed: 18 December 2021).

GDC (2017b) Darkest Dungeon: A Design Postmortem. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IUaGQhlPwo (Accessed: 18 December 2021).

The Escapist (2020a) Darkest Dungeon Devs Answer Your Burning Questions | Gameumentary. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvVlLEVuehA (Accessed: 18 December 2021).

The Escapist (2020b) Darkest Dungeon Documentary – It Would Suck To Be A Hero. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thQvE6XEmis (Accessed: 18 December 2021).

Game No Shokutaku Interview (no date) Souls Lore. Available at: http://soulslore.wikidot.com/das1-game-no-shokutaku#toc0 (Accessed: 20 December 2021).

The Dynamics of Stress in Darkest Dungeon

Preface

Introduction

What are systems and how do we evaluate them?

Understanding the Theme