Lol, interesting description, I wonder do you have to invent something... erm... untraditional in terms of the backstory, if you want to make a successful game?
It certainly helps get people's attention, at least, although if it's too weird it might push some people away. That's about what I expect from something associated with Team Meat, though. Heh.
Also: has anyone seen a co-op roguelike? Or roguelikes and co-op are incompatible in principle?
I don't follow them well enough to have an exhaustive knowledge of them, so I'm sure someone else is much more of an authority on them than I am and could give specific examples. For some of the roguelike subgenres or genres heavily influenced by roguelikes, like ARPGs, co-op play is almost a defining element of them. In the most pure/traditional roguelikes, though, it seems somewhat incompatible, not so much in principle but in implementation. The way they tend to work, where the entire world updates one cycle at a time in response to each action you take, does
not fit well with more than one person playing simultaneously (i.e. the entire simulation basically has to lock and wait for the slowest player each "turn", in the simplest/most naive implementation). With some way to work around that, or if people are willing to sacrifice it entirely and play in real time, there's not really any reason it can't work quite well otherwise.
