Kickstarter has become the go-to resource for everyone who hopes to create the video game of their childhood dreams: A way to gather cash from the masses in exchange for the promise of realizing labors of love that no major publisher would ever bankroll.

Not all Kickstarter game ventures are created equal, though, and some are more compelling than others. Most recently, a project called Chasm caught my attention by promising two of my favorite things in a single, faux-16-bit package: Open-ended action-RPG gameplay and randomly generated environments. In short, a marriage of metroidvania and roguelike games. How could I resist, especially when the two concepts being wed stand at such odds with one another? I reached out to Chasm's developer, Discord Games, to talk producer James Petruzzi about the inspirations and challenges faced by his team's project ( for which a Windows and Mac OS demo currently exist ).James Petruzzi: Chasm is a 2D action-RPG platformer, with inspirations from games like Castlevania, Metroid, Zelda, Diablo, etc. We’re designing it to be a replayable experience, which was what sparked the whole idea to begin with.A year ago, I had a simple idea for how to create Metroid-style maps procedurally. Later in the year, I began working on the original version of Chasm, which was to be a mash-up of Zelda and Terraria. I really wanted that open-world exploration, but mixed with the simpler progression systems of Zelda. I was never able to get the balance right, and after months of work just decided to scrap it.To me, the problem with replaying a game like Symphony of the Night is that you know exactly where everything is after your first playthrough. The rooms are always in the same order, the enemies are in the same places, items and secrets once known are always known. So I began thinking of ways to mix it up.Basically, what we’re doing is hand-designing tons of room templates. The templates are loaded into memory when the game starts, then when you enter a dungeon for the first time, the generation algorithm runs for that floor. We pick templates off the pile, build a dungeon with them according to a bunch of rules, test it, and populate it with enemies, treasure, traps, etc. The current plan is to have three floors per area, and six areas total, along with some special side stuff to do. Each area would have a big boss fight before you proceed to the next.So the next question is, will there be backtracking like most Metroidvania games since there are only entrances and exits on each floor? Our (pending) solution to that problem, is to have floors branch and have doors that are not immediately reachable. For instance, when you get to floor 3, it could branch and lead to two other areas, one immediately available, and one not. Perhaps you go route A, obtain double jump, then backtrack to route B that’s now traversable. This could of course get way more complicated once branches start branching. For the special abilities that allow access to new areas, we want to focus more on acrobatics than weapons like Metroid or Shadow Complex. I’d like to do double jumping, wall jumping, ledge grabs, grapple hooks, sprinting, etc. and really flesh out the move set so it’s incredibly fun to move through these dungeons.I grew up on NES, so I have memories of games like Castlevania, Mega Man, Zelda, etc. ingrained in my subconscious. Looking back, the thing I loved most about those games was that they didn’t over-explain anything. Zelda was probably the most alluring to me, just how mysterious the whole world is, and how you’re left on your own to explore it and solve problems. To me, you can’t beat an interesting world in a game -- I’d take it over traditional narrative any day. To that effect, we’ll avoid telling you the story through character dialogue. Instead, you’ll be piecing together the history the of the world by exploring it, and finding and studying artifacts, discovering journals and notes, etc. These things will be collectibles, and you won’t see all of them on your first playthrough. Unfortunately, the story side really got the shaft in the demo, but we’ll be fixing that for the full game.

JP: I would have to disagree with you there. To me, the contents of the room and the gameplay itself is much more important than the order of the rooms you run through. If you swapped some rooms around in Symphony for instance, would it really make the game less enjoyable?The fun part of the game for me is exploring every possible nook and cranny, platforming through awesome set pieces, battling enemies and bosses, and improving your character. To that extent we’re also developing a concept of set piece rooms that are very unique, and guaranteed to always be on a certain floor. These rooms will help control the overall flow of the floor, leaving the procedural generation to make interesting new ways of connecting them. Maybe “metroidvania” and procedural are antithetical, as someone on NeoGAF so eloquently put it, but personally I don’t think so.