Fixes
- Soul-shop navigation between tier
- Being able to reach locked menu in pause menu suing left/right button on gamepad
- Only a single altar can be activated at once now
- Duplicate achievement (killing C-rank necromancer)
Rogue: Genesia
Hotfix 0.10.0.0e
Hotfix 0.10.0.0c
FIxes
- Challenges adding bonus artifact not having their description displayed (like Plexu's sadism)
Hotfix 0.10.0.0c
FIxes
- Chicken statue, Sheep statue and Golden goblin hand artifact description
- Item on shop not displaying tooltip when not using a mouse
Blood & Steel Update Date Announcement (Update 0.10)
Hello Everyone
The next major update, "Blood & Steel" is coming out on
August 7!
(I initially wanted to have a very different trailer, but sadly things didn't work as intended and I had to settle for an update of the previous trailer.)
This is the biggest update to the game yet, even bigger than 0.9 (which was already HUUUGE).
The changelog doesn't fit in a single Steam announcement, so it'll be broken down into two parts (similarly to 0.9).
What are the big changes of the update ?
Equipment System
Weapon Modifiers
B-rank world & Manor of everlasting memories
Behemoth Graveyard - Variant for the second zone
Weapon talent can be equiped as Passive talent
Locking item in Shop
Artifact Reroll in reward
New Avatar
Challenge stacking
Improved Grass rendering & Dynamic color variation for Dawn forest
Main menu variation based on the selected World-Rank
Main menu lighting variation based on previous run result
(Optional) Projectile cap
option to cap the number of projectiles, this allow to greatly boost performance in late game when there is a lot of projectile.Attacks telegraph
And so many more things
Those were just the "Big Changes", there is so many other small change through all the game!
What didn't make it
Sadly, while I could undefinetly push back the update, I want to move forward, and some things would simply delay the update too much.
New enemies' sprite and animations
The biggest thing here is the sprite and animation for the new ennemies added in this udpate.
Most of them will either use placeholder, or will be missing animation.
I really wanted them to be done for the update, but that mean delaying the update by at least one additional month (with no guarantee it would still be finished), and while it's an important part of polish, they are ultimately not that important to the game, especially as the game is still in EA.
I've just recently found a very talented animator, so the animators issues I had for the last few months last year should greatly improve!
Twitch Integration
Another thing I originally wanted to implement for this update was a integration with twitch.
After having spent a few say on it, I simply couldn't make it work at all, I could never make the twitch client ID being validated, and the documentation of twitch is very outdated.
I don't know if this is something I'll find a way to implement later on, but I prefer to post-pone it rather than blocking the game developement for this.
Rogue: Genesia, July monthly Dev-Blog
To start this month's dev blog, I have an important news to share:
Rogue: Genesia is no longer published by iolaCorp
After months of dedicated effort, I have successfully ended my partnership with iolaCorp.
This is effective as of 1st of July.
Isn't that a bad thing?
Sadly, iolaCorp failed me as a publisher.
At first, I was fine with the publishing deal, especially as I owned a share of the company.
However, disagreements appeared over time, notably in the sharing of expenses.
I ended up doing most of the work that a publisher is supposed to fulfill:
marketing, finding workforce, translation, community management.
While continuing to share 50% of the revenue of the game.
Earlier this year, around March, I finally consulted with them to reach a friendly agreement with iolaCorp so I can retrieve the full rights of Rogue: Genesia.
I am no longer part of iolaCorp, and we'll be walking our own way.
What does it mean for the game?
Not that much, the plan I have for the game won't change.
The main change is that I'll be able to spend more of the revenue on the development of the game.
That also means that, if the 1.0 release of the game goes well enough, I will be able to hire someone to continue working on the game beyond that, but it's still too soon to make any concrete plans for that.
Finally, that also means I can properly invest money in marketing, reaching a bigger audience.
Now, let's get to the work done this month
Month progress
Contrary to previous dev-blogs, there is not that much flashy stuff to show. There are two reasons for that:
First, I was busy with the whole publisher stuff, and it took a bit of time off development.
Secondly, since we are getting closer to the release of the 0.10, I'm actually more focused on polishing, bug fixes, and finishing all the content I need for the release rather than doing big changes or improvements.
So it mostly consists of hundreds of small changes/improvements that don't really fit well in a dev-blog.
There is still a few cool stuff to show, but it won't be as big as usual or as new as usual.
Music
New music also got added in the game.
I've also started to take a look around to make and sell the OST on Steam. It'll likely come a few weeks after 0.10 releases.
This is the fight theme during the Manor stage:
And the elite theme inside the Crystal Depth:
Challenge
This month I've worked on adding new challenges. There are still a few challenges missing to feel complete. Here are a few:
Equipment loadout
A major QoL improvement done this month is the addition of equipment loadouts. You can at any moment either create a new loadout or copy an existing one.
When making it, I had the choice between two ways of doing loadouts. The first was to make a classic loadout system, where you put your equipment in your inventory and then save the loadout so you can load it at any time.
The second way, which is how it actually works:
Was to start the player with a default empty loadout, and that any equipped item is considered equipped in the loadout, so every time you swap an item, it is effective on this loadout. This is more of an automatic loadout, where the first version would require a bit more manual action from the player (saving/loading loadout).
Items can also be equipped in multiple loadouts.
There is no limit to the number of loadouts you can have, and you can name them however you want.
Unique Equipment
My current focus as of now is adding a variety of unique items that will complement the procedural ones.
Unique items can only be found when fulfilling certain conditions (for now, they only drop in certain challenges) and having Unique modifiers.
Here are a few of the already made unique equipment:
There is quite a lot left to make, and the icons take a huge amount of time, so expect a few placeholders for the 0.10 release.
Balance change
It's a minor change overall, but the base move-speed of many enemies got reduced a lot, especially for the faster ones at higher ranks.
Along with the reduction to the speed, I've changed how corruption increases the move-speed of enemies, now having a multiplicative scaling based on OoM instead of linear (so every X10 corruption, the enemies get x1.5 times faster, instead of gaining +50% move-speed).
Another change is that attack speed now belongs to the wind tag instead of the fire tag.
This also changes how the Fire stone (and upgrade) and wind stone (and upgrade) affect stats.
Moving the attack speed of Fire stone to the wind stone, and adding a piercing scaling to the Fire stone.
0.10 release date
I know that last month, I targeted July as the release date, but it's clear that the update won't be ready by then.
The new release target is August 7, but it'll still be hard to meet and may be pushed back by a few day.
I'm currently focused on finishing the update, doing the missing sprites, and those damn animations are still delaying the whole update (sorry).
There are also a few bugs I have difficulty fixing (very hard to reproduce). While they are not game-breaking, I would prefer to fix them before the release of the update.
Rogue: Genesia, June monthly Dev-Blog
First and foremost, I'm looking (again) for a pixel artist animator.
So far this is the main bottleneck to the development of the game, and I'm looking for an extra animator to speed up development.
If you are interested, send me a mail at roguegenesia@gmail.com
Thank you.
Equipment System
Since last month, the equipment system got totally implemented and could be tested.
There has been interesting feedback so far from players in the beta.
Not impactful enough
This is the main feedback that got back to me, is that item don't have enough impact and are too timid.
There has been some interesting suggestion on how to improve that without making equipment too strong.
I also think that for now, most equipment drawback are too strong, especially for a new player when they unlock their first item.
This is being worked on, but I'm still listening to feedback about that.Equipment Modifier Collection
From feedback, the collection of equipment modifiers looks to be fun, this makes sure that even items that you don't like can still allow you to progress/unlock new modifiers by disassembling them (as well as giving crafting materials).
I may also want to improve the drop chance of the rarer modifiers, some players that I expected to unlock almost all the modifiers are still lacking a good amount of them.
There have also been some good QoL improvements to the Equipment system, like the new equipment tooltip
Finally, God stone talent no longer exists (fire stone/wind stone).
I always had an issue with these talents simply being stat boosts, which to me is much more fitting as equipment.
The god stones that you already own and their equivalent level are converted into equipment (accessory slot) with the same stats.
In addition, there is finally the addition of Storm stone, an upgrade of both Fiery stone and Gale stone.
(Icon is just a placeholder)
https://i.imgur.com/TEeVzlN.png
Main menu variety
Another thing I spent a bit of the month working on is adding more variety to the main menu.
There is now a version of the main menu for each world-tier.
The lighting also changes depending on the result of your last game (but it's been in the beta for a bit of time now).
Improved visuals
The first major change in visuals is improving how the grass blends with the ground, as well as reworking the ambient occlusion values to help with that.
This is how the game looked:
And this is how it looks now:
Another thing that started as Fernanda's suggestion and where she did a bit of work on is a variety of color schemes for the forest.
Grass, ground, and tree colors will now vary depending on your location, world rank as well as other difficulty settings in the game.
I've also worked on implementing "Screen Fog", which adds a bit of fog to the top of the screen that depends on the zone you are in (The intensity can be changed in the options menu).
Summoner's Talent
Another big chunk of this month was spent working on adding talents for the summoner.
Each summoner weapon has related talents, with their own passive and active effects.
Passive effects mostly affect summons and allow for some interesting combo/builds, while active effects can often vary, from summoning the goblin shaman to emitting a fiery aura around you, and even one that greatly increases the defense of your golem summons.
Other Stuff
New Weapon
Blood Syphoon (Temp sprite) is a new weapon added recently, that could be summarized as an aimed Death aura, that also heals the player.
The healing is a percentage of the player's health per second, it starts at 2% and increases by 0.1% per enemy drained.
Blood Syphoon talent passive talent also has a particular effect.
I'm not yet sure how players will use this passive effect, but I'm sure it can find its place in some builds.
New Cards
Behemoth Graveyard and the Manor now both have their biome-only cards, here are some of them:
Casual mode change
Casual mode no longer makes the player unkillable.
Instead, dying in casual mode simply brings you back to the level selection screen, giving you any tries you want to complete a stage.
I think this is a good way to still make a run "challenging" without any frustration for players looking for a casual experience.
I've also added a new game mode, "Ultra Casual" which is basically the old casual mode.
There is a warning screen when you create a profile in casual mode to make sure you don't accidentally make a save where you are unkillable.
(I've seen negative reviews because the player couldn't die and didn't understand why)
Marker on health
Small QoL I wanted to add for many months, the player health bar now has small markers that help to know how much max health the player had.
There are 4 levels of markers, each corresponding to a bigger and bigger amount of health, but only 2 can be visible at once (lower tier markers slowly get small and then invisible when you have a lot of health to not clutter the health bar).
New explosion FX
Nothing much, but I've also reworked the explosion visual as the existing one was pretty ugly (and always placeholder)
https://twitter.com/RogueGenesia/status/1791644962636943599
0.10 Release date
I still cannot give a clear date for the 0.10 release, but I believe I should be done with everything on my side for a release in July.
I just hope animations could be finished by this time, but this is also why I'm looking for an extra animator.
If it's not ready by then, I'll make an open beta, and focus on the content for 1.0
Updated roadmap
Before ending this dev-blog, I've updated the roadmap (which is now quite short, but hey, better late than never)
Rogue: Genesia 20% Discount & Steam Endless Replayability Fest 2024
Hello Everyone
Rogue: Genesia will be on a 20% discount during Steam Endless Replayability Fest 2024.
Rogue: Genesia, May monthly Dev-Blog
Equipment System
This is something I've talked with a lot of precaution before, and I'm still not 100% sure it'll stay, but outside of major negative feedback from players, it should be included and be a major part of the 0.10 update.
I've seriously started to work on equipment for the last few days, and it helped me properly refine the idea, find what could work both on a technical and design standpoint.
There are a few things that I definitely wanted to avoid while designing the equipment system:
-
Heavy and frustrating RNG
When first asking players about how they envisioned the equipment system, the main fear of players was that it would become a super grindy, RNG source of frustration system.
It was very clear to me that making an equipment system similar to Path of Exile or Diablo wouldn't fit the game nor please most players.
This is also something I've seen and experimented with in the first version of Death Must Die, where equipment became a major source of frustration since it was the only way to become stronger and it led to a lot of RNG and stalled progression. -
Simply be a more complex Talent system
Another feedback I received is that most of what could be accomplished with equipment could simply be done with talents, and it fitted very similar roles (limited slots, important bonuses), which pushed me to change some minor things in the final design of equipment to make it clearly different from talents. -
Make Early game too easy and Useless in late game
It's another thing I want to avoid: having equipment be "+X Stats" and simply making the whole game too easy.
Multiple ways to counteract that were:- Having some multiplier modifiers & having effects that scale with the player level.
This made the effects lower in the early game, and still relevant later on. - Having "Soul Card Level" requirements depending on the modifier of the weapon before the equipment has an effect.
This will play a super important role in the design of the equipment system.
- Having some multiplier modifiers & having effects that scale with the player level.
-
Become a development hell
Something else I wanted to avoid was having an equipment system that would add too much additional work to the point where it would greatly hinder the overall progression of the game.
This is the main reason I mainly went with a mainly procedural equipment system.
This doesn't exclude having a few handcrafted items, but they are extra flavors that wouldn't require a lot of work.
The equipment system is code-wise very separate from the rest of the code.
The main reason for that is that it was created with the question of whether it would be kept in the game.
And there are like 5 or 6 points in the game code when the equipment system interacts with the rest of the game.
(Actually, there is even a switch in the game code that allows to disable equipment very easily in case modders want to modify it.) -
Mod unfriendly
The last of my worries was to make the equipment system almost impossible to mod.
But the design I finally went for is highly moddable, with even equipment slots being easily modded in.
Final idea of the equipment system
Each character has multiple slots, each slot designs themselves what their positions and size in the equipment UI.
Each "Procedural Equipment Object" has a list of slots they can be equipped in (this allows for multiple accessory slots, or having light equipment being equipped on heavier slots, for example). Those objects also have a list of "Main Modifiers" that they can be equipped with.
Each "Main Modifier" has a list of valid Negative and Positive secondary modifiers, and each modifier has a maximum count of maximum positive and negative modifiers.
Each modifier has a "Card Level" variable that increases or decreases the item card level requirements (negative modifiers reduce it while positive ones increase it).
Modifiers don't have any randomness in the value of their effect (so not having a +1% Attack speed where you could have +5%, but you were not lucky).
Different Modifiers have a set "Rarity"; higher rarity has better effects but also increases the card level more than lower rarity ones. Rarity also affects the odds of having them in an equipment, as well as the minimum Tier of an equipment for it to be generated on.
Equipment have both a "Level" (that goes from 1 to 10) and a "Tier" (from F to S (even more with modding)). Power of the modifiers is only affected by the Level and Tier of an object.
Equipment are rewarded as a reward of a boss stage; the Level of an object depends on the zone the equipment is dropped in, while the Tier depends on the World Difficulty. (there is a bit of randomness in there).
Equipment can be leveled up to level 10 in the main menu; it'll cost Soul-coin depending on the tier of the item. Equipment, once they reach level 10, can have their Tier upgraded in exchange of soul-coin and crafting materials.
Equipment can be recycled and will refund all the soulcoin invested in the item and give crafting material of the corresponding tier.
Later in the game, the player will unlock a new tab that allows them to customize their equipment:
Equipment recycled will have all their modifiers saved in a "Modifier glossary" where they will be marked as "Learned".
In exchange for a certain price, the player will be able to change/remove/add any main modifiers and secondary modifiers (up to the limit defined by the main modifier). This is where the positive/negative soul card level plays an important role, where the player could create very powerful equipment that is only enabled in late game, or make equipment with tradeoffs that can have an impact super early on.
Equipment will have a "Rarity", but it's just a visual thing, based on modifier rarity (50% from the main modifier alone, and 50% by the average of secondary modifiers).
Equipment can be equipped/unequipped during a run (in the pause Menu).
I know this is a lot of information, and that it's changed quite a lot compared to the usual equipment system, but I believe this a system that both adds depth and involvement in it.
What has been done already
So out of the whole idea, what is already implemented?
Code-wise, almost all of it.
UI-wise, it is very, very barebones at the moment, and I focused on the minimum to make it work.
The save/loading of equipment is also working well.
Here is how it looks like right now:
Recycling and upgrading of items is also functional.
A lot of the work left is also in the content itself.
I've already done more than 144 Modifiers, but there are still many left to add all the slots I would like to make.
What is left to be done
The modifier crafting is still missing.
The whole process of learning modifier is there so modifiers from recycled items won't be lost.
There is also a lot of work to be done on the UI/UX.
Item tooltips are the bare minimum, with no comparison.
You cannot drag and drop items yet, nor can you see only equipment specific to a single slot either.
Item Icons are just placeholders.
A ton of balancing; most of the values are just straight out of nowhere and will require some playtesting before it's good.
Equipment presets (so you could define early-game/later game equipment and easily swap between them).
Unique equipment from specific bosses.
These will come when I'm sure the system is set to stay in the game.
What if it's not left in the game
If feedback on this is negative and there is no way to properly integrate it into the game, the whole system will be disabled in the code.
That means that for those who love it, a simple mod that tells the game "enable equipment" would allow it to be enabled very easily.
The first version of the equipment system is playable in the beta of version 0.10
5th zone boss
Another big task I was focused on during this month was the AI of the 5th zone boss, the Vampire Queen.
One of the main aspects of this boss is that she also possesses the ability to slow down time, similarly to the player.
This special characteristic is represented by 3 things:
- She has a passive that makes her temporarily immune to Anachronistic, meaning she can damage you.
She has a bar that depletes during anachronistic, and that slowly fills up overtime. When the bar is empty, she's affected by anachronistic like any other enemies. - Active ability that slows down time. This ability was a bit tricky to balance and make sure it's not frustrating.
This ability slows down the entire world (player and projectiles) by 50% and slightly speeds up the boss. 50% feels like a good balance between giving a clear indication that the player is slowed down without making it frustrating.
The ability also only lasts a few seconds. - Ability that plays around time stop.
After completing the first phase, she'll occasionally almost stop time (1% original speed) and quickly throw multiple knives at the player before resuming time.
(Yes, that's a Jojo reference)
The boss also has other abilities, but I'm not going to spoil everything.
Other changes
The last month was mainly occupied by making the new boss and the equipment system, but there are a few noteworthy things to tell about:
Better telegraphing
This is mainly a beneficial fallout from the Vampire queen boss.
There was a need for much better telegraphing, so I made 3 different types of telegraphing that also got added to other bosses.
Camera shake
A minor thing that I wanted to add is a bit of camera shake.
Obviously, there is an option to tone it down (or increase it for the brave) if it's uncomfortable.
They are mainly used in boss intros to give more impact and a few of their attacks.
Current and Future Modding
As many may know, modding is a little bit dead at the moment.
This is easily understandable; the game is still in early access, and some mods can easily be broken by an update.
While the base support for modding is there, there is a clear lack of documentation on the subject, and the API could clearly use improvement.
I'm totally open to suggestions on what guides people would like to see on mod creation, as well as things that are not clear or that could be improved.
Modding is not the highest priority right now, as I prefer to focus my attention on the game itself.
I also plan to make a modding contest with small cash prize, especially after version 1.0, when the game programming will be stabilized.
I originally come from a modding background, and I believe this could be a great opportunity to develop a community in the game modding, and this is the sort of thing that could definitely help the long-term lifetime of the game once I've finished working on it.
I'm thinking of making the first contest about challenges.
Online and Local Multiplayer
In the comment on the previous Devblog, someone asked about a coop.
Even overall, this is something that got asked a few times, so I believe it's a good subject to talk about.
I have no plan for coop in the game, either online or locally.
There are both technical and design reasons for that.
First, an online multiplayer would have too much data to synchronize between users.
4 players each having 200 simultaneous projectiles at 20 ticks per second would require about 1 MB/s, which is a lot for a game (a typical FPS usually uses around 100 KB/s).
And 200 simultaneous projectiles is not that much in Rogue. Genesia (I've seen games with tens of thousands of simultaneous projectiles).
Secondly, there is also a technical knowledge limitation.
I have almost no knowledge or experience in networking or multiplayer.
and those things are far from easy and could easily end up becoming development hell and taking multiple years to implement.
especially as the game architecture was never designed with multiplayer in mind, none of the systems support such a thing, and it would basically mean remaking most of the game from scratch.
Then comes the possibility of offline co-op.
It's technically much easier to implement in the game—not easy, but definitely more realistic.
However, it would also require a lot of small things to be reworked to support multiple players, especially on the UI.
We are talking about a about a month of work.
Then comes the design reason that pushes me against multiplayer:
Rogue: Genesia power scaling during a run is exponential; enemies usually have their health multiplied by 100 for each zone on average, and the player is meant to follow a similar trend on his power level.
This means we could easily end up with one player carrying the game and the other players simply being powerless.
This is a design issue. I've noticed a lot in Risk of Rain 2, and the scaling there is much less aggressive than in Rogue: Genesia.
Those reasons are why I don't plan to make the game multiplayer.
However, if a moderator were to try to tackle this challenge, I would provide any assistance I could to make this a reality.
0.10 Release Date
I sadly cannot yet give a release date for 0.10.
There is obviously the fact that equipment testing just started, and there are a few things I want to add to the update.
But again, the enemy animation is likely to add additional delay to the update.
which again is fine as I'll simply advance some planned stuff for 1.0 into the 0.10 to prepare ground for 1.0 content in advance (notably the talent upgrade tree).
I would also like to hire an additional animator or sprite artist around July to speed up the development of the game.
I prefer to avoid hiring anyone right now for reasons that I cannot disclose yet (and that I hope I'll be able to during my next development blog).
Rogue: Genesia, April monthly Dev-Blog
This blog post will be focused on the advancements made in the last month toward update 0.10.
Finished Manor Visual
While some sneak peeks were shared during previous dev blogs, the zone was far from being finished.
Finishing all the visuals took me quite some time, but I'm very happy with the final result. It's by far the best-looking area of the game.
So here are new screenshots for the new area of the zone:
Shop Locking
As some may have noticed on the last screen, there is now the possibility to lock items in the shop.
This allows you to guarantee they will appear in the next shop rolls.
You can lock a maximum of three items simultaneously in the shop (slots are unlocked with soul-shop upgrades).
Card Requirement Change
Card player level requirements have been replaced by cumulated card level.
This means that cards no longer care about the soul level of the player, but the total level of all the cards owned by the player.
I believe this is a better expression of the progression of the players, as some avatars like the shopkeeper had much lower overall levels, or some challenges that directly removed any source of experience basically banned a lot of cards.
Active Talent as Passive Talent
From feedback I've received, most of the grindiness perceived by players was the level of talents, especially active talents that could only be leveled once at a time.
To fix this issue, I've made 3 changes:
- Increased mastery gain formula, there should be on average 50% more mastery gained.
- Reduced the kill requirements to unlock a weapon's talent.
Reduced from 100K kills to 50K kills for heroic weapons, and from 50K kills to 20K kills for Epic weapons. - Active Talents can be equipped as passive talents, so you can level up multiple at once.
Of course, simply making active talents be equipped as passive for additional mastery gain is boring,
So in the process, I've added passive effects to each active talent that are only active when the talent is equipped as passive.
This greatly improves the pool of passive talents and gives much more diversity of choice.
Here are a few examples of passive effects for active talents:
There are still a few active talents that are missing passive effects as of now, but they will slowly be added over the beta lifetime.
Hyper-crit Rework
Hyper-crit got a buff to be a more important mechanic to play with.
Until now, the scaling of hyper-crit was linear, with each stack of critical simply adding +1 to the multiplier in this way:
x1 > x2 > x3 > x4.
With the new scaling, the damage of critical is multiplied by 2 for each stack of critical applied, so it is now following this formula:
x1 > x2 > x4 > x8.
One of the main reasons for this change is that it was most of the time much more worth it to simply go for as much level of "Absolute Focus" than increasing critical chance above 100%, and didn't add any importance to the choice.
I hope this change will add a proper build choice between going for hyper crit or going for absolute focus (in the case you're going for a crit-build).
I also think this should make the addition of cards that increase critical chance but reduce critical damage more interesting.
Challenge Stacking
Maybe one of the more exciting additions for a few players and a massive QoL for many.
After watching a few streamers playing recent versions of the game and collecting multiple feedback, a major issue that arose is that early-game challenges (specifically F-rank and E-rank) are more of a checklist than a proper challenge for most players, and can become especially frustrating for experienced players to play through.
The issue is that they don't really feel difficult, especially when they are playing after completing other ranks and simply become boring bloat to go through.
Directly increasing the difficulty of these challenges, while a possible fix for this issue, would also make the game less accessible, and would simply be satisfying a part of the player base while sacrificing another part, which is simply not something I was willing to do.
The best compromise I could find was to make most challenges "stackable." In the way that you can now activate multiple challenges at once and complete them all in one go.
This allows for challenges to still be "easy" to complete, while giving the possibility of more skilled players to have harder challenges and complete them faster.
Balancing
I'm not gonna go through every little bit of balancing done, but I think there is a few things that gonna please to players.
Necromancer Nerf
To the joy of many, Necromancer got nerfed (yet again). The nerf is a major reduction to the summon count of the necromancer. In addition, I've fixed a bug that allowed the necromancer to summon enemies directly on the player position and could cause frustrating death.
Divine Shield
Until now, Divine Shield required Moon-shield as a requirement, but it wasn't aligned with the theme of moon-shield, divine shield being a faith-build card, which usually wants to lower moon-tag and reduce defense and defense multiplier as much as possible. So from now on, Divine Shield will now require Light-armor instead. While not being perfectly aligned with the idea of the faith build, it'll work well together for them.
Moon Shield
As for Moon Shield, it got a rework. It'll now appear much earlier in the game (only requiring Card-level 5) and its main purpose is to rail the player into obtaining metal transmutation. It no longer reduces attack-speed, but instead reduces power multiplier by 20%, which no longer makes it collide with metal transmutation. In addition, it now increases moon tag drop-rate by 25% instead of 5%, which also greatly increases the chance of metal transmutation appearing and helps toward a defense build.
Other Balance
To get quickly through them:
- Silk Edge got a buff but appears later in a run
- Armor-less, Zealot, and Metal Transmutation all require Card Level 50
- Many cards now also provide a bit of tag drop-chance
- Tactical Soul kill requirement reduced from 10 Million to 5 Million
- Concentration is now a weapon modifier
Backup
As some may or may not know, the game creates a backup of your data every hour and always keeps them in the save folders.
For various reasons, players can lose their progress, and it's almost always recoverable. I've made a guide on how to replace your current run with the backup on the Steam forum.
However, many players are simply not tech-savvy enough to follow the recovery process, and I've often had to spend time helping some players recover their backup via emails, or seen negative reviews from players losing their saves (when they are easily recoverable).
To help with that, I've decided to add 2 new buttons in the profile manager to load either Persistent data backup or achievement backup directly within the game.
Rogue: Genesia, March monthly Dev-Blog
This blog post will be focused on the advancements made in the last few weeks toward update 0.10.
As some may know, the beta for update 0.10 started about 2 weeks ago, so let's see what's already done:
Weapon modifiers
This is one of the main features for 0.10.
Weapon modifiers are cards you can equip on weapons.
Weapons have unlimited slots for modifiers, but a modifier can only be attached to a single weapon (there are ways to increase this limit).
This feature was already half-coded into the game, so adding the missing stuff was quick, which is the reason it's the first thing added in this beta.
However, attaching all the modifiers to a single "god" weapon is not the most optimal way.
Some modifiers like Thunder Spirit would be better equipped on slow but heavy-hitting weapons,
while Ice Spirit would be better on AoE or high attack speed weapons.
Weapon modifiers can be equipped in the Weapon tab in the pause menu.
The game will try to automatically equip newly obtained modifiers on the most optimal weapon.
In addition, card now display what type of card, whether it's "Stats", "Weapon", "Effect" or "Weapon Modifier"
Many already existing cards got changed to become weapon modifiers and a few new cards got added.
I plan to slowly increase the pool of weapon modifiers during the beta.
Any suggestions for new cards are welcome.
RogNGesus
This started as a semi-joke avatar I thought of, but I ended up really liking the concept.
RogNGesus is a direct reference to RNGesus, which is the meme personification of luck in video games and role-playing games.
The main gimmick of this character is that each stage, a random effect will be rolled, there is 20 different results, each having either positive or negative results
In Survivor's mode, the stage roll is instead rolled every minute (affected by the player time).
In addition, his card tag drop chance is randomized from -50% to +100% at the start of a run.
Amber dune alternative zone, "Behemoth Graveyard"
A new alternative zone has been added to the game, a western-themed zone.
This zone also introduces more impactful terrain generation, with the addition of cliffs that prevent grounded enemies from spawning there (and walking over the void).
This pushed forward 2 problems that didn't exist before and that were required to be fixed to properly start working on the second zone. I'll come back to these in the next section.
Next Zone - Manor
This is likely the most awaited addition and the main subject of this Dev-blog.
The 5th zone (and by extension B-rank world) is currently in development and is the most unique zone in the game.
Let's talk about the 2 problems that appeared previously.
Terrain Generation rules
The first issue was to handle more complex terrain generation.
The terrain generation was created following a "Wave function collapse" algorithm, which is basically picking a first random (or non-random) module of terrain, and then for the next surrounding module, pick a compatible one and repeat the process until all the pieces of terrain required were generated.
Each module size is 100 meters by 100 meters and the game generates a 3x3 grid around the players, which is enough to handle every case in the game.
In 0.9.1, the terrain generation only handled and checked 4 borders, South/West/North/East.
It was good enough for what was used (basically generating some variant of the same terrain or simple path generation),
but it wasn't enough for situations where the northwest was different from the west and south-west; it wasn't possible to convey the 3 stages of an entire side this way.
An example being the cliff with 1 third of "hole" and 2 thirds of desert terrain.
There was still the possibility of creating some special border that basically said "Cliff/Desert/Desert," but it would mean a ton of additional complexity and lack of flexibility, especially if I added more types of terrain later on.
This led to me reworking the system deeply to handle the 4 borders and the 4 corners, but also handle varied sizes of grid in case I want to reduce the size of terrain for some zone to be 20x20 or anything I would want.
Valid Spawn Position
With the addition of holes (and walls), this led to many positions in the game where enemies shouldn't be allowed to spawn,
like a grounded enemy being spawned over a hole, or any enemies being spawned in a wall, but also to avoid spawning enemies on the other side of a hole/wall as proper pathfinding would be too expensive with the amount of enemies in the game.
Thanks to a friend of mine who found the following solution:
Each hole/wall has a collision area that is set to them, called "Terrain Collision". Each frame, I check every terrain collision visible on screen and detect angles where no terrain collision exists.
This ensures that enemies always spawn in a direction that doesn't have holes to spawn in, but also that no major obstacle would obstruct them.
The blue sphere is the distance at which new enemies are spawned, in green, the valid angle generated
As you can see, the detection of valid angles is not perfect, but it's good enough to prevent...
The new varied terrain required handling things that weren't planned at all, like collectibles dropped from flying monsters in inaccessible areas or shrines spawning in walls/holes.
For the former case, the solution was simple: slowly move the collectible toward the player until it reaches a valid position.
For the latter, the same solution wasn't viable. I didn't want generation to vary depending on how the player would approach the terrain spot, so the final solution was to use "safe spots" in the terrain generation.
These are positions that are known to be in the playable area that I manually set.
When the shrine is generated in an invalid position, trace a line from the original position to one of the safe spots, and take the first valid position on this line.
I preferred this solution over a "socket" one since it allows for a lot of different objects to use the same safe spot as a reference and still have different final valid positions.
Other Minor Things
Reworked "Game Options" Menu
Something that I have noticed, and that always frustrated me, is how often players would miss the drop-down on the top-left of the menu and then miss out on the multiple tabs of game options that exist.
Some workarounds have been tried to improve on it, like making the drop-down yellow/golden, but it was mere patchwork that wasn't enough.
This was a clear indication that the way it was presented was fundamentally wrong and this led me to redesign the game option menu to make sure players don't miss the tabs.
Similarly, the Mod option menu got the same changes.
Slight Anachronistic Rework
Due to a lot of factors (mainly visual bugs) and upcoming content, I had to refactor how anachronistic was working.
Until now, when anachronistic was activated, it slowed down the timescale of projectiles and enemies, which didn't affect the game speed.
The main issue with this approach is that particle effects weren't affected by this change (and there was no way to manually affect them without a massive overhaul in the game code).
The new approach is to slow down the entire game and speed up the player character accordingly.
This fixed the issues with particles and made the entire process lighter to handle (it's easier to speed up the player than having to slow down every enemy and projectile, even if they were using a global variable).
In addition to that, there is now a small visual transition when activating anachronistic.
Shrines Are Now Affected by Tag Drop Chance
That's it.
I believe it makes tag drop chance have more impact on the game and gives more control to the player.
Artifact Reroll in Reward
This was requested a lot and always pushed back. But I believe it'll become important as more and more artifacts are added into the game.
From now on (and on the condition you have the required Soul-Shop upgrade), you'll be able to reroll any random artifact in the reward screen once (per artifact).
(This only applies to random artifacts and doesn't affect set-artifacts like event rewards).
Content
As usual, a bit of additional content has been added to the game, even if it's not the focus at this phase of the beta:
3 weapon modifiers, 2 passive talents, as well as 1 new artifact.
Beta Roadmap
There is still quite a lot of things planned for this beta, but the biggest chunk of it is mainly the 5th zone, especially as it was quite heavy on the modeling and texturing. Here is a rough idea of what I plan to add:
- Shop-Lock Feature
Similarly to many auto-battlers, the ability to lock one or multiple things in the shop for the next shop or reroll.
This will only affect shops of the same type (blacksmith to blacksmith, shop to another shop, shopkeeper level-up to another level-up).
And it'll only work on cards, consumables, and artifacts (you won't be able to lock a limit break or a card selection).
This should be the next thing I work on and should be part of beta update 3. - Equipment System Test
In a few beta updates, I'll implement a rough version of the equipment system to check if it properly fits into the game.
This will be an experimental change that may or may not be kept in the game. - Twitch Integration
This is something I want to investigate for a long time, but I think it's time to add Twitch integration into the game.
I'm still not sure how I want it to be implemented, but I'll likely open a Community Feedback about it in the upcoming week on the game discord.
Of course, additional content is also planned as usual.
I also expect this update to be (yet again) delayed by the enemies' sprites/animations.