Fixes
- Cursed challenge stage sometime not spawning any enemies
Rogue: Genesia
Hotfix 0.9.1.g
Hotfix 0.9.1.f
Changes
- Slightly increased back the monster count in Cave zone
- Decreased number of skeletons spawned by the necromancer
Also Slighty Increase their health and damage to compensate - Slight change to stage generation seed
for some reasons, the previous way created a desync between my debug tool and the game, and made debugging save properly impossible - Buff to Pike and it's mechanic
Base damage increased from 1.5 to 2.5
Gain bonus damage at level 3 (+0.25), 5 ( +0.5) and 7 (+1)
Increased the bonus damage from hitting at maximum range from x2 to x4 (provide guaranteed critical hit)
Added a smaller bonus damage if you hit from almost the maximal range (x2, doesn't provide guaranteed critical hit)
and an even smaller if you hit with the 25% end of the pike (x1.5, doesn't provide guaranteed critical hit)
Fixes
- Thunder spirit in other than english language (truly this time)
- Being able to sometime take damage and die during a boss intro
- Elite not spawning in elite stage
This required a well needed refactorization to how enemies are chosen, so there may be some unexpected bugs) - Katana talent not working
- Pike collision not scaling with it's size
- issues with Fight & Flight not correctly removing itself
- Decaying armor not being removed upon taking damage (and not unregistering from event when removed)
Hotfix 0.9.1.e
Important Notice
A few player noticed a massive degradation in performance right from the start of a run since 0.9.1 update on old gpu (didn't found the exact models that cause it, but I would say older than Nvidia's 10th series)
This is caused by a graphics jobs not being supported by older GPU, this is something I will investigates in the future.
For now a simple work-arround is to do the following:
go to your game folder, and then Vanilla/Rogue Genesia_Data,
open the boot.config in a text editor (like notepad)
Search for the line stating:
gfx-enable-gfx-jobs=1
change the 1 for a 0:
gfx-enable-gfx-jobs=0
Fixes
- Major memory leak caused by Katana, wisp (void and magic) and sword-rang talent
Commands
- New Command - godMode
Toggle Godmode, require to enable cheatmode
Physiscs
- Changed back Simulation mode from Update to Fixed Update
Update caused major glitch in case enemies were colliding a lot with each other and caused "explosion" to move them or even the players on long distance when leveling-up
This change should decrease performance at low FPS, however, the maximum timestep was increased from 0.1s to 0.5s, (which mean it shouldn't affect performance until you hit 2 fps instead of 10 from before)
Hotfix 0.9.1.d
Changes
- Greatly increase drop-chance of evolution card you don't already own (multiplied by 8)
This should greatly help players obtain the first level of evolutions card, especially in survivors mode - Removed Survivors time in Steam leaderboard (since infinity is reachable, they don't really serve much purposes as of now)
- Slight change to how soft card requirement are handled (before, just having the corresponding tag would be valid, now you require both the tag and another of the requirements)
Fixes
- Divine shield not being obtainable or unlockable
- Thunder Spirit localization causing glitch in German translation
- Exiting and entering controls option multiple would push keybindinds down
- Music not changing for Arena stages fight
- Shaman Staff - bugged talent
Reworked the talent to now use the summon system made for summoner
Hotfix 0.9.1.c
Fixes
- Flight&fight stats name
- hand of cheater description
- Event choice overlapping at certains resolutions (like 1440x900)
- Card tree display issues at certains resolutions
- Input UI in zone selection not being correctly updated
- Huge GPU performance drop in third zone fight
- Major performance issues that slowly degraded performance over-time
- Arcane Beam talent missing description
Hotfix 0.9.1.b
Changes
- Improved Arcane beam width & damage over leveling
- Updated Death aura sprite
Fixes
- Witch being invisible when attacking
- Flight&Fight description
- Arcane Beam level 1>2 being a nerf to attack speed
- Icicle damages being reported as "Other"
- Archer enemies sometime doing moonwalk
- SSU_CardSelectionChoiceCount soul-shop upgrade
know bug (and already fixed for future version) : displayed: 3% > 4 instead of 3 > 4
Hotfix 0.9.1.a
Fixes
* Localization error in zone selection screen UI
* localization blitch with Blood transmutation, Metal transmutation and Zealot in other language than english
Update 0.9.1 is out !
but that not all, the game now officialy have a proper trailer !
If Steam don't give you the option to update the game, you can restart steam and it'll automatically download the update.
You can check the patchnote here:
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2067920/view/3953664641950728703
Rogue: Genesia, 2023 (and January monthly) Dev-Blog
First off, happy new year to everyone!
Retrospective
The game has now been released for more than one year and has been in development for almost 2 entire years
(This section is large and will speak about the creation of the game and Sales count).
Game origin
The game development could be said to have started as far back as February 2022.
Originally, the project name was Idle-Wave, and it was meant to be a very different game.
The idea was to have an idle-type game with a village to build, and you had to do runs to collect some resources to collect resources or even monsters to do monster husbandry to help progressing in the idle part.
The idle part of the game allowed you to start later in the wave, accelerate time, and overall be stronger for the run part.
It started with a prototype on which I worked with a friend.
I was doing the run part, and he did the idle part on his free time.
I had a pretty good prototype base for the survivors part (prototype that can be downloaded from the museum channel on the discord)
After around 2 weeks, we started to explore using ECS and DOTS from unity; this could allow for insanely large amounts of stuff to happen without performance issues, but it's a programming paradigm that I didn't understand back then, in addition to been really buggy at this time.
After a few days of no progressing at all, the game idea being refined and looking more like Vampire Survivors with a glorified Meta-progression than a proper game, a divergent view on the game with my friend, and a new contract I had to work on, this put an end to the development of the prototype.
There is nothing out of the ordinary for game-dev; ton of prototype get killed super early for a vast number of reasons.
Around 3 months later, during April 2022, I was watching a video of the game Round-Guard (which is basically Slay the Spire and Peggle combined) around 30 minutes into the video It all clicked in me and I thought of making a mix of Slay the Spire and Vampire Survivors.
The idea looked unique enough to me to be worthy of being developed, as making a simple clone of VS wasn't really worth it to me.
So I went back to the prototype I made back in February and worked for a few days to make a Slay the Spire style map generation.
This is what it looked like back then:
Pretty barebone, there was no shop, no boss, chest was just a card selection, same for event, icons were placeholders. but it was playable, and it was enough to know the concept was worth being worked on.
Then I implemented shop, artifact, worked on the graphics, made UI, and did a ton of polish for the next 2 months.
It was super intensive (and quite unhealthy); I could easily work 12 to 15 hours a day, taking a break only to eat or sleep.
But I achieved to make something worthy enough to be made a demo for Steam.
The demo then got published on August 7, 2022.
That's more or less how the game was created.
Since then, the game evolved a lot, while it was looking polished compared to the early prototype, the game released back in September 2022 was very rough compared to the current state of the game.
Player Count
A tool often used by game developers to track player counts over a lifetime (for both its own game or other game) is SteamDB.
This was a very precious tool to analyze which game did work or not, what did bring players or not. I obviously used it a lot to track player counts on Rogue: Genesia, so this is the player count graph of the game during its lifetime:
As you can see, R:G had a loooot of players during the reason, and even for the whole end of 2022, reaching a minimum concurrent player count of 500 during late December.
But the player count slowly and gradually declined, and that's entirely normal for a single-player game. The game today is usually hovering around 100 concurrent players, which is still a pretty good number.
The pike you can see on the game are the major updates the game received,
- 0.7 update boosted player count from 1300 to 3100
- 0.8 update boosted it from 300 to 1400
- 0.9 update from 170 to 600.
Medium-sized updates do a small bump to player count, but they are barely noticeable.
My interpretation is that most players are now waiting for the 1.0 of the game to return to it.
So I better make sure the game is as good as possible for 1.0 release and not rush the game release.
Price increase and Sales Count
Looking back, there is a lot of misconception players make about the sale count for video games. Players think that an update increases the sales of the game. Or that a huge increase in players after an update means there are a lot of sales happening.
Similarly, I remember that when I announced the price increases for Rogue: Genesia, I often heard players being worried that the price increase would drastically reduce the sales count of Rogue: Genesia, and that it would kill the game, so let's look at the evolution of sales count during the lifetime and analyze them:
Sale count followed a similar course, with a very big early spike and a continuous and slow reduction, but in a more pronounced manner than player counts:
86.3% of all sales count of Rogue: Genesia was done between the release and the first January 2023, and only 13.3% of sales were done.
That means the price of the game reduced the sales count right ?!
Update 0.7
Here is the sale count graph from release to December 2022, and in red, the day the price increased from 2.99$ to 4.99$ when update 0.7 was released:
As you can see, this price increase did not significantly affect the sales count of Rogue: Genesia. Similarly, the update which boosted the player count by x3 did not increase the sales counts.
One may say that the price increased compensated for the sale increase from an update?
Update 0.8
Let's see what happened when update 0.8 was released:
You can see an increase of sale for the following 3 weeks until it slows down back to a normal level.
However, there has been a -10% discount going on starting on March 16, and the actual effect on the update was the following:
- In red is the decaying effect of the update,
- In green, the moment the -10% discount started
Now, the part in red wasn't just the update increasing the number of sales miraculously; it was due to Content creator making video on the game when the update dropped (to name them, it was both Sifd making a ton of video and Wanderbot releasing a video just after the release).
The 0.7 update did not have much simultaneous exposure (and there has been a lot more copies sold at this time, so similar exposure wasn't noticeable)
Update 0.9
The 0.9 update received close to no exposure at all (Wanderbot did a video on 0.9 about 2 months before the update dropped, so it wasn't really relevant anymore), and the price increase didn't have any effect on sales, same as 0.7:
- In blue, you can see the Wanderbot video of July 2023 and the slight increase of sale that followed
- In red the release of 0.9 update and the price increase from 4.99$ to 8.99$
- In blue, you can notice a first increase; this is due to the bundle with Lethal zone for its release.
- In green, this is the first time Rogue: Genesia got a discount of -20% during the Bullet Heaven Fest followed by the Autumn Steam sales.
The part in Green may look huge, but it's around the daily sales I was doing back in December 2022 without any discount.
Youtube vs Twitch
Before going to the conclusion, I want to speak of the difference in sales impact between Twitch and Youtube.
From my observation (both on Rogue: Genesia and other games), Twitch usually leads to a sudden spike in sales, that instantly stops when the streamer stops playing it, contrary to youtube videos which often have a small spike but have a long sale tail.
I'll take the 3 days AdmiralBahroo played Rogue: Genesia in the livestream; this happened just before update 0.8 was dropped:
As you can see, there was a huge spike and it quickly dropped down to normal value afterward, contrary to the spike that follows that was longing for additional days.
Usually a medium-sized YouTuber that makes a video on a game will have as much impact in total sales than a large streamer playing a game for 2 hours.
Conclusion
As you can see, the increase in price did not have an impact on the number of sales the game did; the number of sales naturally decreased over time, with a huge impact for the release. Content creators making video/stream does increase the sale of a game for a short time.
What mainly affects the lifetime sale of a game is how much Steam is willingly pushing it to new customers. And this is greatly affected by how big is the biggest wave the game did.
For most games, this wave happens at launch, so it's SUPER important to a lot of wishlists for game-developers before releasing their game and make a powerful impact on Steam so the algorithm continues to push your game to new customers for a long time.
Work-time balance
Before finishing this long section of retrospection, I want to talk about my work-time balance.
As many know (I've always been open about it), I worked an unhealthy amount of hours daily without taking any day off I managed to greatly reduce the amount of time I spend on working since then. Following the advice of people in the comment, I've taken a whole month off after 0.9 update release, and now I'm managing to keep an almost healthy amount of work time, trying not to breach the 8 hours a day too much or too often.
Plan for 2024
I originally planned for the EA of Rogue: Genesia to end by the end of December, but no amount of unhealthy work time will allow that, and it's better to slow down and take the time I need to reach it. Ultimately, it pushes back the next game I want to work on to mid-2024, but it should be fine. R:G is still bringing in enough money so I can continue to work on it, and I still believe the 1.0 release of R:G should bring in enough money to peacefully budget and work on my next game.
I also want to slightly change the release plan of updates (and consecutively the prices increase).
My original plan was to make update 0.10, increase the game price to 12$, then do update 0.11, increase the price to the final price of 15$ as it would be 1.0 version in terms of content, then focus on polish for 1.0 and have a -33% discount for the release.
However, a lot of things that I wanted to do during the 0.11 > 1.0 update ended up being done during the 0.9.1 update.
New plans
0.10 Update is unchanged, but it won't have a price increase to 12$.
After the 0.10 update is released, I'll start working on the 1.0 version of the game.
About one month before the 1.0 release is finished, I'll increase the game price to 15$. When the game is ready for 1.0 (and the discount cooldown is finished), I'll publish the 1.0 update with a -33% discount (for a release price of 9.99$ during the discount).
Update 0.9.1
In the last blog post, I hoped for the update to be done before Christmas, but as you can see, it's another delay!
I likely caught Covid (didn't got tested, but the fact I've lost a part of salt-tasting is making me think it was Covid) at the beginning of December, seriously slowing down the development of the update.
Then came the Christmas period, and then...
I got sick again since about one week ago... (and still a bit sick)
I'm still advancing on the update, just slower than I would like, but it shouldn't be far.
I'm focusing on fixing the last few bugs I know about and the small little nitpicks left in the update.
I would even have said ready for the 15th of January if I wasn't sick, so expect it to drop during next week.
Since the last blog post, some cool stuff has been done:
Challenges Level
Challenges can now get stronger!
Well, some challenges can now be increased in difficulty.
This can have different effects, like increasing the rank of the challenge or increasing the effect it has, but also increasing the soul-coin reward for completing it.
You need to complete the previous level of a challenge to give a try at the next level of it.
This new feature is aimed at the most experienced players who are always looking for new, more crazy stuff to accomplish.
Steam Achievements
I know a lot of players were asking for more Steam achievements, and OH BOY!
They are gonna love this update.
All the achievements in the game are now added to Steam.
There have been 2 reasons why I didn't do it sooner:
- Steam put a limitation on the number of achievements a newly released game can have, and I knew that Rogue: Genesia had many more achievements than this limit.
I just discovered recently that I could go above this limit (no, there was no notification of when I could). - Steam has no tool to add in bulk large amounts of achievements.
There is a way to massively edit localizations of achievements, but for adding new achievements, you have to manually add them, one by one, and upload both the locked and unlocked images manually.
This means at best 2 minutes per achievement, so for R:G, which has about 200+ achievements, this is days of work that would be spent on it.
But after pushing it back for a long time, I ended up "hacking" a website testing software to automate the achievement uploading automatically from a Json file and images file.
Card Tree
A small QoL addition I originally planned to make for 1.0.
A tree of soul-cards to easily see which cards are required or built into which card.
This should make card requirements or evolution much easier to understand for players.
White thin lines mean that it requires any of the cards,
Red line means it requires this specific card.
There is still space for improvement, but this is a great addition.
Trailer
Rogue: Genesia never had any trailer.
Well, Steam asks for a trailer to publish the page, but I simply put a small gameplay video randomly taken because it's the only thing I had.
And it's funny to see video using this as if it was the real trailer of the game (especially today at how outdated it is)
But this will be part of the past!
The official trailer of Rogue: Genesia is complete and will be published at the same time as Update 0.9.1.
Rogue: Genesia, December monthly Dev-Blog
Open Beta
The announcement for the open beta has brought a lot of players to test out the beta. So far, the percentage of players playing on the beta has gone from 1% to 6%.
It's still a small number, but it makes me more confident in the overall stability of the 0.9.1.
There are still a few bugs popping up left and right, but nothing too major (outside of the bugs I've talked about during the previous announcement).
0.9.1 expected release time
If all goes well, I hope for the 0.9.1 update to be ready before Christmas!
Things done this month
Let's talk a bit about the lot of changes I've made during this month.
New elites modifiers
The last Beta update (update 11) also added new elite modifiers that appear in rank C+.
They should bring a bit more variety to elites. They are slightly more rare but more powerful than the existing modifiers.
The most powerful one also increases the drop reward from elites, so they are a great opportunity for the player!
New Quality of Life (QoL)
Since the main blocker to the update was the sprite/animation creation, adding more content would just end up delaying the update even more.
So, I focused a lot on improving QoL or adding more UI that I would need for the next update.
Weapon Tab
It doesn't serve much purpose yet, but it was still asked a few times.
This tab allows you to know which weapons you already own and how many slots you have left.
This tab also shows what weapon modifiers you have (even if that's still a bit WiP).
It will become important in the next update when weapon modifiers are properly introduced. You can also check more information about your weapon damages.
Weapon Damage Graph
Talking about weapon damage stats,
At the end of a run, you can check the damage graph to see the damage of all weapons during a run. You can identify which weapon was your best at which time.
To access it, simply click the damage source on the left, and a small graph will be displayed.
You can choose either to have a linear display or a logarithmic one.
You can also check the kill count of the weapon over time!
This graph will also greatly help me balance weapons as I will likely receive more feedback about weapon performances.
Stacked Damage Numbers
Another Quality of Life improvement I wanted to add to the game for a long time was stacked damage numbers.
It took me a bit of time to find a way to have each enemy possess a number that follows them without absolutely tanking performance.
After a bit of experimentation, I've found a way to technically achieve this. This should greatly improve the visibility of the damage you dealt to enemies.
Of course, there is an option to disable it or have it together with the old damage numbers.
Health Bars
Using the incredible technology of particles following an enemy, I finally added an option that allows every single enemy to have a small, simple health bar over their head.
After playing with it enabled, I don't think I can go back to not having them on.
In addition, I've improved all health bars to color the bar for Damage over Time that will apply to the entity (for both the player and enemies).
Zone Selection
A change that was added recently is the possibility to now choose which zone variant you are going into. It's not much since there is only a variant for the first zone, but it will be a good addition when more zone variants are added to the game.
This change will also allow me to add more card specifics to a biome or have synergy required set biome to be obtainable without frustrating the player who is being locked out of a card by the RNG.
Rework of the Sound Design
As many know, the sound effects of Rogue: Genesia are lacking in many aspects (while some other aspects are liked by players).
I've recently hired and worked together with a sound designer to improve the SFX of Rogue: Genesia and add new ones.
So far, our focus has been to slightly improve the existing sounds, either by cleaning them up or layering them with other sounds to make them more satisfying or adding a bit of depth.
Our next focus will be to add proper sounds for weapons and enemy types (only the enemies of the forest biome have specialized sounds for them).
Soul-Card Pool Issue
In this month's Dev-Blog, I also want to talk about an issue that has been slowly growing over the updates: Soul-Card pool issues.
When the game was first released, there were around 60 passive soul-cards and around 18 weapons. One year later, and this number is closer to 200 passive soul-cards and 40 weapons.
The available card pool suffers from two very opposing issues:
1. There are too many cards available in the early game, greatly bloating it and making building more RNG-prone.
2. There are not enough cards for the late game, leading to runs looking more and more alike.
Update 0.9 made a bit of an attempt at fixing these two issues, pushing higher rarity cards slightly later into the game, but also locking some cards behind others, and by adding biome-specific cards to the game.
While I think it was an improvement, it was far from enough.
I also received a lot of suggestions to increase the number of bans the player has, but this is just focusing on the result rather than fixing the root of the issues.
This would also lead to players spending a lot of time simply banning cards in the early game.
I've been thinking of a better solution for a bit of time, and I think I've finally found one and also wanted to discuss it with you.
The first step was made during Update 10 of the beta:
Adding a level requirement to some cards.
I focused on cards that had heavy drawbacks and were rarely taken in the early game or were overall not the most liked and pushed them back to later in the game.
This cleans up the early game pool for higher value cards and keeps those cards to better define builds already started by the player, so they can make better decisions when they appear. (Examples of cards I pushed back on level are Compromise, Clumsy, or Tradeoff.)
For now, the change is still minor, as the higher level requirement is only level 50 (around the end of the first zone).
(Of course, Shop-keeper has a lower requirement than other characters due to the lower level he can reach.)
Later on, I would like to move build-defining cards to level 30 (cards like Armor-less, Average, Transmutations...) and make them unlock a lot of additional linked cards, adding specialization to these builds that would only unlock at higher levels.
Of course, a player could take multiple build-defining cards and mix them together.
This should keep the freedom of building while allowing players to keep control of the cards they have available. All while keeping the early game from being bloated.
This is going to require a lot of work and is very likely to greatly change the balance of the game, but ultimately I don't see a better solution to the problem here, especially as B and A ranks will be added into the game and require even more cards.
If you have any feedback on the idea or want to discuss it, you are greatly invited to share your thoughts in the comment section (or the Steam forum/discord)
What to Expect with 0.10
Since we are approaching the release of 0.9.1, that also means we are getting closer to the development of Update 0.10!
This update will have the major rework of the soul-card pools I just spoke about.
It'll obviously include the addition of the B-rank difficulty and the 5th zone.
Weapon modifiers are on the list, as well as a variant for the 2nd zone, "Desert of the Giants."
There is a lot more to be added as usual, but these are the BIG things to be added.
(I mean, 0.9.1 was supposed to just include new enemies for snow biome...)