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Rogue: Genesia
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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.
Hotfix 0.9.1.4.a
Fixes
- Ice Nova talent blocking boss
- Some shrine spawning at a way lower difficulty that they are supposed to (looking at you Nera shrine)
- Golden altar event
Too low gold given for stealing that it was supposed
Appearing chance being too high early on - Right/Left tabs not updating correctly the pause menu tab
- Right/Left tabs not working correctly in gamemode selection menu
Update 0.9.1.4
Talent
- Ice Nova Active Talent Added
Throw a large icicle in the aimed direction
Deal 500/1000/1500/2000% of your weapon damage
Slow-down enemy by 80% for 4/5/6/7 sec, slowly regaining it's movespeed
Cancel the active spell of the enemy/boss
Changes
- Survivors Challenges can now be leveled to increase the world rank it can be played on
- Critical strike Increase Defence Shredding effect
Double the effect on critical strike
Increase it further for each Hyper-crit stack
Fixes
- multiple commoner's guidebook dropped by villager events
- Stats menu XP and Health not being updated
- Card in Survivors mode displaying "Only Appear In" when it wasn't relevant
Rogue: Genesia, February monthly Dev-Blog
This dev blog won't focus on new development since everything made is in the stable version.
In the first part, I'll talk about balancing and difficulty in Rogue: Genesia. Then I'll discuss the future months of development and what is planned!
Game Balancing
Balancing a game is never an easy task.
And there is even a need for balance in the balancing. Having a perfectly balanced game is boring; it simply makes any choice meaningless as you end up with the same power/progression regardless of what you do. This is a trap I've seen quite a few games fall into (not specifically this genre).
Difficulty
One of the major components of balancing is handling the overall difficulty of a game over the time it's played.
Usually, you want it to start low and slowly increment to higher values.
However, what is considered ultra-hard for some players could qualify as easy for others.
This is true for many games, and this is true for Rogue: Genesia as well
My approach was to make the difficulty targeted at medium-core players, in part because I am part of this group, but also because I think it fits most players on Steam who actively look for indie games.
The game features a main progression that is made to be overall "easy" for this type of players so it's not a frustration point and allows players to progress if they want to. Meta-progression is also a tool I use for two purposes:
- Giving tangible progression via the power of the characters, both with stats, effects, and more control over your build.
- Allowing lower-skilled players to out-grind the difficulty if they really need to.
This is something I've seen Death Must Die miss when it first released, with a big progression wall during the second half of the current content (first act) which left a lot of players grinding with almost no progression until they finally beat their first run.
They quickly fixed this and improved the progression since then.
It is still a very good game that I would recommend to fans of the genre!
Challenges
With the main progression of the game clearable for most players, another issue arose: the game is too easy for players with experience or hardcore gamers.
This is the purpose of challenges.
Which I totally shamelessly stole from Idle-Games, I admit!
I had to make all those wasted hours on Anti-Matter dimension worth it.
Challenges are modifiers of a run that add handicaps to players in multiple ways. They can both reduce the power of the players, increase the strength of monsters, or add special rules to alter the way players engage.
Similarly to idle-games, challenges give a reward to help the players push themselves in the form of rewards.
Then, another issue came up:
many players were frustrated by some of the hardest challenges (Like the original Snuffhead's Favourite which was impossible in its first version) even though they were "optional bonus content".
After exchanging with the vocal players about that, the main issue was the fact it gave gameplay advantages locked behind super hard content.
So the best compromise I could find was to simplify these challenges that unlocked content to be completable by most players with a bit of experience, and make hardcore challenges that only unlock cosmetic stuff on "Hard Mode challenges".
This calmed the frustration of players about the hard challenges and allowed the players looking for challenges to be satisfied.
But alas, as the game gets more content, the possibility of getting stronger also increased, so for the most experienced players, even the hardest of the hard challenges became a regular run for them, and a cool suggestion appeared:
Allowing challenges to be leveled up.
This was quite simple to implement (scale the modifiers with the challenge level or increase the world rank (or both)), and allowed almost unlimited difficulty for those hardcore players.
Leveling a challenge doesn't unlock anything and won't ever, as it's only there as a playground for players looking for the most extreme challenges.
Play-style
Another important aspect to balance is the different playstyles that the game allows.
This is important to keep depth in the game to ensure all playstyles allow for equivalent progression.
And while it's not totally voluntary at first, the game ended up with having 5 main (and 2 sub) damage archetypes that have been identified. More are likely to appear as new content is added to the game:
- Raw Power
This is the first archetype players will play with; it is quite easy to achieve, has good damage output, and has a lot of cards to support it. - Metal transmutation
This is also a popular damage archetype that allows players to have both good defense and offense. It takes a little bit of set-up to obtain it but ends up having decent damage output. - Lunar Inferno
Sub-archetype very similar to Metal transmutation, is a damage archetype that scales off both defense and damage mitigation, with the price of reducing other Power damage sources. The strongest archetype early-game but falls behind other archetypes in the late game. - Blood Transmutation
This one, while sounding similar to Metal Transmutation, is in fact very different. It is likely one of the strongest archetypes but also one of the hardest to properly achieve, as it requires a lot of artifacts and cards to obtain but has very good damage output while giving survivability. - Faith
This one received a lot of improvement during the 0.9.1 Update, adding a whole bunch of cards to support this damage archetype. It is one of the strongest ones but also one of the hardest to play with. It sure gives humongous damage output but also makes you very weak and easy to die as any damage you take is greatly increased (and negative armor applies AFTER damage mitigation). - Defense Piercing & Defense Shredding
This last Main Archetype has a low initial damage but is also the damage archetype that can reach the highest value due to the ramp-up nature of this, so it's very useful for high corruption growth challenges where other archetypes may fail damage-wise. Update 0.9.1.3 also buffed this archetype as it now slightly scales with the damage multiplier of your weapon. I'm still listening to feedback about this change. It relies a lot on Attack-speed. - Silk Edge
This Sub-archetype also relies on Defense piercing to scale, transmuting your base power and power multiplier into Defense piercing. It was relatively weak prior to 0.9.1.3 buff, and it should be more viable now. It is recommended to use this archetype with other damage archetypes to help clear the weak enemies and let defense shredding kill the strongest ones.
I try to make sure all of the archetypes are worth it, with both upsides and downsides, so they are situational and not always optimal.
For example, Blood Transmutation or Metal transmutation are weaker in Glass bone challenges compared to raw damage or faith build, for example.
Nerfing approach
Like many games, balancing is not just about buffing things up when they are weak; sometimes, you also have to make the hard decision of nerfing things that are just too good. I try to nerf things only when it's necessary.
Overall, my approach to deciding if I need to nerf something is that I ask myself 2 questions: How strong is it? How easy/hard is it to obtain?
If something is easy but not as strong, then it's fine too; it may need a bit of tweaking, but usually, it doesn't need nerfing.
If something is strong but also hard to obtain, then I think it's fine to keep it slightly too strong at the price of making it harder to obtain.
Death scythe is an example of it; it is by far the strongest weapon of the game, basically making any number of HP points a detail due to it either one-shotting smaller monsters or removing %HP of the strongest monsters.
However, I also have to make sure it doesn't completely invalidate other things to not make the game a race to obtain this one thing that wrecks absolutely everything.
(which is also why the most optimal way to reach infinity now uses cleaver instead of Death scythe as it's a very hard weapon to obtain now)
If something is both strong and easy to obtain, then it very likely needs a nerf. Complete and perfect immortality also falls into that category.
A recent example of this is the Throwing knife during the 0.9 Update, which was both very strong (high damage output), easy to obtain (it was a weapon you can obtain right at the beginning), and even given immortality (keeping dash button pressed).
Small tweaks
Small adjustments that I want to make in the near future include a slight nerf to the necromancer and a minor buff to the lava titan to smooth out the difficulty curve.
Soundtrack
When the game first released, the OST wasn't well-received, and I often received feedback that it felt off.
It wasn't an easy decision, but based on this feedback, I decided to look for another composer to work with.
In the end, I collaborated with 3 composers on the "new OST" (though there are still 2 small tracks left from the previous composer as I believe they fit the game very well).
So far, the feedback on the new OST has been very positive, with even negative reviews appreciating the game's OST despite criticisms of the game itself.
Discussions with the composers and iolaCorp have started about selling the OST on Steam.
The goal is to have the composers receive a revenue share from the sale of the OST to please everyone and also allow players who wish to support the composers.
Additionally, I've started uploading the game's OST to YouTube for anyone to listen to.
1.0 Release
In the comments of the 0.9.1 release post and in the previous blog post, I've seen many players eagerly awaiting the 1.0 release of the game.
While I know this is a good sign that many players feel like the game is getting into a good state for 1.0, I want to remind everyone that there is still one major update to land before that.
I don't want to give an exact release date as nothing is certain as of now. An optimistic prediction would be July/August, but it's likely to be later.
I initially wanted the Early Access to only last 1 year, but the amount of things I ended up adding (and want to add) to the game greatly went beyond my expectations.
Nothing major changed in the general plan for updates, so I think it's still fine in the end.
0.10 in the meantime
While development hasn't started yet, I want to begin actively working on it during the second half of February. I want to address the last big/medium issues that have been reported so far, and then focus on advancing the game again.
0.10 will focus on enabling weapon modifiers, introducing a new variant for the second zone, as well as the 5th zone, which will likely require a lot of work too.
Test for equipment
I've been very hesitant to add equipment, but I think it'll be worth spending around 1 week during the 0.10 beta to experiment with equipment. I'll make a branch for it for players who wish to try out the equipment system and gather feedback.
Based on the feedback, I may want to push the equipment system to completion or completely scrap the idea for good.
Talent rework
Another thing that I wish to do, but more likely for 1.0 than for 0.10, is a small rework of the talent system.
The idea would be to create a small upgrade tree for each talent, where each talent gains 1 upgrade point when they level up.
The idea is to make talent upgrading a bit more interesting, adding a bit of choice in the way talents are upgraded, and maybe even making active talents lean toward either more passive or active upgrades.
In addition, this would make the unlocks of other talents easier to understand since I could simply add a node that unlocks the next tier of a talent.
This is just an idea I'm exploring since a few day, but I believe it could be a good addition without denaturing the game. That will depend on how much time I want to spend into it
Update 0.9.1.3
Changes
- Reduce Acid Coating max level from 10 to 5
Doubled it's effects to compensate for the reduction in levels - Corrosion Damage Mitigation reduction changed from 5% to 2%
- Mind Corruption Tweak
Increased Defence shredding multiplier from 10% to 20%
Reduced max level from 10 to 5
Also increase Defence piercing by 10% - Unholy aura Damage mitigation reduction changed from 10% to 5%
- Weapon aura max level increased from 1 to 2
Additional projectile reduction changed from -2 to -1.5 per level - Weapon polish max level increased from 6 to 10
- New Stats - Piercing Scaling
Damage multiplier from weapon now increases damage piercing
Default Value at 5% (nothing modify it's value for now)
A weapon with 1 damage multiplier increase damage piercing by 5%, a weapon with 20 damages multiplier, increase damage piercing by 100%.
This should help damage piercing scaling
Fixes
- Ever increasing list size for object generation when going far away
the list is now properly cleaned - Modifier being applied to non monster entity by railgun and causing errors
- "Item Name" reward in challenge with "No Artifact" and "No card in stage reward" conditions in place you would normally obtain artifacts or cards
- Achievement that should normally be hidden being shown in certain conditions
- Empty stats category left in the stats list
Hotfix 0.9.1.2.f
Fixes
- Fiery dash being displayed as Fire Spirit damage in enf of screen menu
- GiveCard command not updating the card list in pause menu
- Localization issues with Love&Hate description
Hotfix 0.9.1.2.e
Fixes
- Thunder Spirit not working on Gunslinger
GunSlinger Tweak
- Tier 2 weapon can be obtained at level 20 instead of level 25
- Reduced maximum level of Gunslinger weapon from 7 to 5
A lvl 5 gunslinger weapon will have equivalent stats than a level 7 weapon from before - Improved reload speed of pistol
Since you simply cannot swap for other weapons early on, having a long reload speed is too much of a penalty - Reduced Enemy move-speed by 30% when playing as Gun-Slinger
This should help keep the game more readable and manageable as it require an active play-style
Modding
- Added both "DisplaySelectedWeapon()" and "DisplayAmmo()" virtual function to the AvatarData class to make the ammo counter and weapon selection work on any avatar (and not just the gunslinger)