Rogue Islands
Demon Portal's Broken & Fixed
We uploaded a fix which solved the problem for us. But please inform us if you encounter anymore bugs similar to this. It's a very odd problem since it doesn't always show up in the release build, and never in our debug build.
Thanks!
v.81 Terrain Generation Improvements and Bug Fixing
New Terrain Generation
We are working to improve and diversify the terrain generation algorithms. Both to create more variety and also to create more interesting play spaces.
This update has the first of our efforts with an alternate Florid Vale generation algorithm. Going forward, each island type will have several variations that will be randomly selected from. Which will greatly enhance the diversity of terrain that you will experience as you explore the islands.
- New! Alternate terrain algorithm for Florid Vale (improved from last build)
- Fixed bug: Food wasn't spawning in clumps
- Change: Scorched Peppers not available till Mottled levels, but now more of them
- Change: Boosted volume of enemy Zap Shot, Zap shot now pushes player
- Fixed bug: Briny Moss not growing as much as it should
- Change: Fireball explosions push player
- Fixed bug: Dark Tick explosion wiggled between local/world space
- Change: Dark Ticks do more damage, and push player
- Change: Dark Roses spread out across larger area
- Fixed bug: Food way too rare in Permadeath mode
- Fixed bug: Levitation canceled on death
- Change: Spell confirmation defaults to "Yes" to be consistent
v.8 Procedural Demon Portals and Wild Skull Enemy!
Demon Portal Quest
We heard you guys loud and clear. The Demon Portal quest was too easy and a bit anti-climactic.
So we made a procedurally generated jumping puzzle, filled it with a new enemy type and put the demon portal right at the top of it.
Now you have to leap and fight your way to the top. In later levels, the demon portals are very high in the sky, so better take a Peppy Acorn or Puffed Bean before you attempt it...
More improvements are coming, but we wanted to get this in the hands of players straight away.
As always, thanks for the feedback!
- New! Procedural Demon Portal structure!
- New! Wild Skull enemy type
- Fixed bug: Dark Spikes no longer spawn underwater
- Fixed bug: Root Boil attack loop too quiet, changed color, spikes persist after death
- Fixed bug: Noxious Wisp looping SFX now audible
- Fixed bug: Noxious Wisp drops loot on death
- Change: "meditating" has noticeable visual effects and SFX
- Change: Horik given "boss" vision (can't hide on him)
- Change: Rye Grass gives bigger adamant boost
- Change: Overall less of 'special' food items (ones that have passive effects)
- Change: Removed Ruby loot from Horik
- Change: Reduced overall enemy count in Mottled & Sinking Levels
- Change: Gurgleweed has glowing purple tip to differentiate from Spinefish (fred)
- Change: Doom Wall attack loop volume boosted
- Change: Briny Moss remodeled, easier to see
- Change: Bone Knight slash radius reduced slightly
- Change: References to "Pazuzu" removed from globe
v.79 New Enemy: The Noxious Wisp!
Noxious Wisp
An ethereal web of toxic goo, surrounded by choking poisonous gas. Found in the Golden levels and later, the Noxious Wisp will hunt you down and poison you.
It resists all but fire damage, so the best strategy is to just run away!
Florid Vale Terrain
The Florid Vale has a new set of terrain generation algorithms that will randomly take over on some islands. Adds a lot more variety to the early levels.
Rare Food Items
Some of the more powerful food items were too rare and too difficult to find. Peppy Acorns and Lucent Cherries are now more plentiful and easier to see. Peppy Acorns are also more powerful now as they offer a speed boost in addition to doubling your levitation distance.
- New! Noxious Wisp Enemy in Golden levels (and later)
- New! Florid Vale terrain generation algorithm
- New! Grass, wood, foliage and mushrooms have individual "Burnt" state for fire
- New! Animation sequence while hiding on Ship shows what is chasing you
- Fixed bug: Bolt Spell gets lost if player teleports too far from it
- Change: Music fading more predictable and optimized
- Change: Fire spreads faster, burns out more quickly (optimization)
- Change: "New Game" screen simplified, now has confirmation
- Change: Hell Bat fireball does 50% more damage now
- Fixed bug: Root Boil glowing off until spikes are fired.
- Fixed bug: Dying while in slow motion no longer stays in slow motion
- Fixed bug: Dark Spikes were broken (again)
- Change: Dark Spikes larger / more visible
- Change: Now reveal smaller radius on map, can see where you've been easier
- Change: Upped Bolt damage at lowest level so it can 1-shot Bones
- Change: upped Spirit Dust in treasure chests
- Fixed bug: Bones spawn rate accidentally lowered
- Change: Can now carry 2 Scrolls of Teleportation in all difficulty modes
- Change: Increased Bone Knight slash attack range
- Change: Wild Bulbs now grow in all biomes
- Change: Scorch Spell locks on much easier now
- Fixed bug: Death screen stat was broken
- Change: Removed LODing on Ghasts so you can see them all on the island
- Change: Boosted number of Lucent Cherries and Peppy Acorns
- Change: Lucent Cherries now glow, Peppy Acorns larger and brighter
- Change: Peppy Acorns now make you RUN faster (and levitate longer)
v.77 Environmental Wand Reactions
It all felt a bit floaty and disjointed.
In v.77 we reworked the wands. Their default position is now closer to the camera so you feel much more connected to them. We also implemented a dynamic sensor that will push the wands closer to the camera when you are walking up against a wall. This really helps you feel grounded in the world, and you'll never see the wands clipping into the environment.
Most FPS games render the weapons on a separate layer, but this has all sorts of side effects. It's hard to match the elements correctly and they tend to look a bit like they are 'floating' above the rest of the scene (because they are). Our wands are fully integrated into the scene. So they render correctly; taking shadows and casting light on the surroundings.
Having the character actually pull their wand closer to them when up against a wall, and seeing the gem light up the wall really helps you feel grounded in the world.
- New! Environmental Wand Reactions
- Fixed bug: Dark Spikes broken (v.76 regression)
- Fixed bug: Bloodcap weren't destructable (again)
v.76 New "Root Boil" Hazard and Lots of Changes
Root Boil Hazard
Only found after the Florid levels, our new hazard is a disgusting blob that grows on cliff walls, and cave ceilings. It comes armed with 5 thorns that it will spit at the player if they enter it's proximity. If you get too close it blows itself up, taking a large part of the terrain (and you) with it.
So keep your eyes out and shoot it from a safe distance.
We're also finishing work on a new enemy type which should be ready for the update coming this weekend!
<*>New! "Root Boil" Hazard / Enemy
<*>Change: Enemies have equal chance of spawning at all elevations (not just near ground)
<*>Change: Increased Vile Shaman hit points 25%
<*>Change: Increased Hell Bat hit points 25%
<*>Change: Increased Horik's hit points 100%
<*>Change: Bone Knight hit points upped 25%
<*>Change: Reduced Seeker Spell damage at higher levels
<*>Change: Reduced chances of Emerald shards in early game and late game
<*>Fixed bug: removed beeping sound when starting level
<*>Fixed bug: Bloodcap now destructable
v.75 Swarm, Bolt and Bone Knights Balanced and Fixed
So starting tomorrow we should start seeing a lot more "New" items in the changelog.
- Change: Bone Knight moves quickly into melee range while aggro. Much faster.
- Change: Bone Knight Raw resistance bumped from 25% to 50%
- Change: Bone Knight Fire resistance bumped from 0% to 25%
- Change: Reduced volume of food-destroyed sound effect
- Fixed bug: fire/acid destroys food now
- Fixed bug: some flammable materials were not set as flammable (wood, grass etc)
- Fixed bug: Dark Roses deal damage shortly after destroyed
- Fixed bug: UI could not use cancel shortcut while in "Character" screen
- Fixed bug: Swarm Spell Wasps get stuck behind player (breaks spell for whole island)
- Fixed bug: Swarm Spell released wrong number of wasps
- Change: Increased Swarm Spell Wasp damage & Bolt Spell damage
- Change: Swarm Wasp damage scales with spell level
- Change: Increase attack range of Swarm Wasp and Bolt spell projectiles
v.71 TONS of Fixes, Destructable Thistles and Steam Cloud Saves!
Bugs vs Features
We didn't quite get our new enemy in the game today because we would rather make sure that everything that is already IN the game is well polished and bug free.
It's just a different development philosophy. Many devs will mush features into their games and then bug fixing and optimization are left for 'later' (if ever).
Not so with us. We have a "bugs first" policy.
So please bear with us while we get everything ironed out for your guys. New stuff is on the way, we promise!
Steam Cloud Saves
We recently encrypted our save game format. And now we're storing it in the cloud as well! So you can take your playthrough with you wherever your Steam account is.
You don't have to do anything, Steam will automatically sync your save games for you.
Destructable Thistles
The thistles are called "Dark Roses" now and they're more deadly than ever. To counteract this, we made them much more visible and DESTRUCTABLE!
This was probably our #1 requested fix lol.
- New! Dark Roses (previously "thistles") now destructable!
- New! Steam Cloud Save support (pick up where you left off on any PC)
- New! Can now right click to instantly eat food items in inventory
- Change: Dark Rose damage boosted 2x (more visible and destructable now)
- Optimization: Dark Rose perception optimized significantly
- Change: Increased pick-up range for Gurgleweeds
- Change: Reduced chance of adamant in Golden Forest levels from High to Med
- Change: Very Low chance of adamant after Golden Waste
- Change: Reduced chance of flamestone in Cliffs levels from High to Low
- Change: Explorer can carry 3 food, 2 scrolls, 2 nightmares (2,1,1 otherwise)
- Change: Horik drops a full Ruby with the Charred Switch wand
- Fixed bug: removed tree with no foliage spawning in Sinking levels
- Fixed bug: removed pine trees with no trunk in Golden levels
- Fixed bug: player now able to jump off pile of debris
- Fixed bug: map colors now reflect block material colors correctly
- Fixed bug: Load Game list sorted by date now
- Fixed bug: Load Game list displays proper "total time played" now
- Fixed bug: Load Game list date format simplified
v.7 Quality of Life and Bugs
In the meantime we bundled together some very nice quality of life improvements, bug fixes and balances tweaks.
More coming tomorrow!
- New! Block debris bobs and floats or slowly sinks depending on material type
- Change: Instructions filtered by most recently used keyboard or joystick
- Change: Hiding on the ship digests all the food in your stomach
- Change: Increased slow-motion speed while in crafting UI (harder)
- Change: Player collides with block debris now
- Change: Halved food spawn rate for Hardcore mode
- Fixed bug, see right through terrain when looking at snowy bushes
- Fixed bug, loot falls through ocean floor
- Fixed bug, Death screen font colors wrong
v.61 End-Game Final Score, Secured Save Games, Fixes
End-Game & Final Score
There's a new end-game now. The story and presentation is all polished up. And it presents you with the final stats for your playthrough as well as an overall final score.
The final score takes into consideration all the loot you collected over the course of the playthrough and all the enemies you killed. The final score is weighted and summed together and presented along with all the other stats.
I think we'll have some achievements for beating it with several degrees of high-score.
Encrypted Save Games
Going forward, all save games for Rogue Islands are encrypted. It was extremely easy to tamper with the save game and some evil players (you know who you are) would instantly give themselves all the spells and loot. And they could easily steal many of the achievements by doing so.
So for this reason, we no longer support loading older, unencrypted save files. In fact, they will be deleted if they are detected in the save game folder. Just to be clear, all save games before v.61 will be deleted next time you load the game.
We thought about doing a full cloud-save only strategy. But we didn't want to prevent offline playthroughs. So this is a good compromise between security and ease of use.
We are truly sorry for this inconvenience. But this is Early Access and sometimes we have to break things so we can move forward. We cannot allow loading unencrypted save files anymore. I hope you understand.
- New! Save Games are encrypted
- New! End game statistics and score displayed before credits
- Change: Explorer mode, player damage reduction increased from 25% to 40%
- Change: Explorer mode can carry 2 Nightmares now (1 plus backup)
- Change: Hardcore mode, player now takes 25% more damage
- Rye Grass size decreased 40%
- Ancient Scroll renamed "Scroll of Teleportation"
- Added warning/reminder when consumed last Nightmare
- Fixed bug, undefined behavior if unlocked achievement while not logged into Steam
- Fixed bug, lack of controller spams null reference in output log
- Change: show notification warning when traumatized
- Change: updated achievement descriptions