Coldrice’s Duster is More Than Your Average Western

Duster, from Coldrice Games, is one of the publicly available demos I decided to check out from the Gradient Convergence event on Steam, which is part of the 2020 Game Developers of Color Expo. It’s a proc-gen roguelike western that tasks players with making it westward across a map to retrieve lost gold. 

If I didn’t know any better I’d say Duster was taking the building blocks of games like Elder Scrolls and Fallout 3, and throwing them into the proc-gen roguelike blender. In that, however, it manages to emulate aspects of those games that even most AAA titles haven’t. Instead of the vast open world with a billion things to do, Duster evokes sandbox aspects like picking your character’s skill set to choose between approaches like fighting in the open or stealth.

When you build your character you can pick a class like a banker who’ll earn more money, or a hunter who can sneak around easier. On top of that you pick starting gear with advantages and disadvantages in health, attack power, or movement speed. You’ll have to spec carefully because you only start with enough money to get yourself prepared for one specific role when buying gear at the general store in the first town.

The first character I built was a prospector who maybe wasn’t so good in a fight but knew how to mine rocks. I spent what little money I started with on a pickaxe and some water to stay hydrated.  Luckily, as soon as I exited the starting town I ran into a cave full of raw ore and a little bit of gold which came out to quite a bit of money. Only problems were the cave was full of venomous snakes and it was so dark I couldn’t see them until they were right on me. My pickaxe made for a good enough weapon but the snakes eventually overtook me. Maybe I should’ve bailed out of the cave once I decided I’d earned enough in hopes of finding some healing supplies in the next zone.

My second character was a hunter, so instead I invested in a revolver and a dozen bullets. I was able to earn a pocketknife – a useful early-game melee weapon, by hunting a snake in the starting town (with a stick I picked up, not my gun, because bullets are rare) and handing its meat to a guy in the saloon. Once out of town I immediately commenced raiding bandit camps, but Duster is not a gunslinging game, or at least it doesn’t start out as one. Bullets are rare and fairly expensive. When three outlaws ran towards me I shot the first one, which caused the other two to run away. Separated, I could take each one down with the knife. Looting them wasn’t quite as lucrative as the cave, but the outlaws certainly dropped enough to survive on.

Generally, Duster seems to be a survival game, but compared to other roguelikes I’ve seen it feels decidedly more systemic. You can manipulate mundane objects, animals, and all sorts of hazards in the environment. Its systems can interact with each other independent of you, which makes the possibilities in its procedurally-generated zones feel that much more vast.

I’m pretty sure I saw a rat kill a snake in the starting town, and I traded the snake’s meat for a knife (the guy who gives it to you doesn’t always appear, sometimes another character offers you a different trade). You’ve got your predictable happenstances, like watching an outlaw get mauled to death by a bear while you make your escape, but on one run I successfully hunted a deer with a knife because it got caught in a cactus grove. 

I didn’t even get into environmental hazards like ponds full of leeches, or drinking water that might give you cholera.

The current demo represents the basic mechanics planned for the game, but only a fraction of the actual content. Between now and Duster’s currently-planned late 2021 release, Coldrice plans to add more factions to stand in your way, and generally more kinds of encounters and items.

At first glance Duster might look like a typical western, but its setting is a deliberate look at a real part of the old west you don’t usually see in Hollywood. Coldrice claims they based the setting on the part of California’s history between its annexation and the California Gold Rush in the 1840’s.

“A lot of people were immediately pushed out of their homes and it didn’t make for a good time for a lot of Latinx people living there,” Coldrice said.

The idea for the setting originally came about in an attempt to do something like Zorro, the fictional hero of Spanish California. “I was already prototyping new map loading systems, dynamic combat systems, etc… and so I tried to meld the systems into the game idea,” Coldrice said. “I wound up spending a lot of time sort of removing the culture from it and trying to make what I thought ‘gamers would like’ and it fell pretty flat.”

Instead of just making another action game, Coldrice decided to put the flavor back in by drawing from the stories he grew up with. “I decided to sit down and really think about the kind of story I wanted to tell, and what I wanted was to put Latinx people in the spotlight.”

The makeup of Duster’s characters and its character creator also try to reflect the real demographics of the time. “The majority of ‘cowboys’ were non-white, something not particularly shown in ‘westerns.’ So in Duster the randomized characters are created based on the real racial statistics. Your character is always dark skinned.”  

“A lot of people don’t actually know anything about the 500+ years of the Mexican people in what is now the US,” said Coldrice. “It’s surprising to me, but also an honor to be able to bring it up in maybe just a small way.”