Genre: Role-playing (RPG), Hack and slash/Beat 'em up, Indie, Arcade
Soulstone Survivors
Devlog #10 - The Cursed Captain!
Ahoy, Void Hunters!! We bid yer welcome onboard of our latest update the Cursed Fleet. We’re excited to share some pirate concept art and character insights, reworked ascensions, and more!
As we progress further into development, we also invite you to sign up to our new mailing list and be among the first to find out when its released!
Development Process: The Cursed Captain
In our Devlog #9, we shared sketches and discussed the principles that guide our character design. This time, we're thrilled to reveal some of the actual work that goes into creating our newest Void Hunter: The Cursed Captain!
Cursed Captain - Visuals
When the team decided on what the new character would be, Alex went ahead and created these awesome concepts below: Our aptly named 3D Artist, Colombo then transformed the concept into the playable character we get to enjoy, but this also came with its challenges. To create the menu animation, which shows the character using a rope to drop down to the scene, Colombo used a script/plugin called SpringMagic which simplifies doing this kind of real life physics simulation.
Unfortunately this simulation doesn’t create keyframes, making it impossible to export the file and use it in the game engine. So, to circumvent this, there is a lot of manual testing, tweaking and thinkery involved to make it work.
For the Captain, it was even more challenging because he is holding the rope, so Colombo couldn’t let the simulation make the rope move, rotate, or twist freely; otherwise, the character’s hands and feet would follow and distort the entire character: So, even after simulating the rope, there were a lot of adjustments to be made by hand which ultimately resulted in the cool animation we see today:
Cursed Captain - Ascension
When we design these characters, we also try to keep our player base’s desires in mind while trying to create something that both feels good, is fun to play and has its own quirks for you to test out and explore, but of course, this always comes without its own challenges.
While we were thinking of the captain’s ascension, we wanted to make something that felt epic and impactful so the Ghost Ship sailing across the map blasting monsters was the first idea we had, but due to limitations such as the top-down view, visual pollution and constant player movement, we had to go through different iterations before getting to the version we have in the game now.
Our first idea as you can also see in our Devlog #9, was to make the ship circle the player from just out of the screen and shoot in a straight line, but it didn’t feel quite… right. We took a lot of time discussing how much screen time the boat was getting and how we did not want the boat to look like it was directly “linked” or “connected” to the player, as you can see in the video below: The main challenge here was trying to make the movement of the boat “feel” natural, while having it visible “sometimes” but not ALL the time (as it gets in the way).
We had to come up with a movement logic where the boat was always nearby, but if you saw it, it looked like it was sailing naturally, which means no hard turns, no weird stops… but if it sailed naturally all the time, it would be very hard to see the boat, as it would make very large turns and sail away most of the time. The solution was to make the ship kind of loop around, trying to get close to the player all the time, so it is always turning to try to get to a certain distance from you, but when it is off screen, it speeds up based on how far away it is from you, so you don't see the boat turning around at 500mph to come back to you if you happen to intercept it somewhere in the map. Since the ship would be far away, we had to change its attack to be in an arc, so that it could have global range and still make an impact. Check out the difference in the video below: While thinking of what uniqueness the pirate could bring to the game alongside its ascension, of course rum immediately came to our minds (figuratively, maybe a little literally too) and thus was born the Pirate Rum rune! Alongside a new type of Versatility runes, which we are internally calling “the meme type”. If you ever wanted to know what it was like to play the game drunk and probably throw up here ya go: “What will we do with the drunken sailor early in the morniiing? Way hay and up she rises!”
Cursed Captain - Character identity
When designing a new character, once we have the theme and the ascension ready, its time to think of the skills and how they will give the character a unique playstyle but also play well with existing skills, which is easier said than done when we already have hundreds of skills in the game.
For the Captain, in addition to a few new skill behaviors such as Plunder Shot that gives you Ammunition when the projectile hits enemies and Cursed Shot that is a projectile that hits the same target multiple times, we also wanted to bring something that tied together the theme of the character and its mechanics.
We already have a few instances of exclusive traits such as the Assassin that has Backstab, so we started thinking of what would be fitting for this character but also interesting for other characters, and that is how Cursed came to be. It works essentially like Electrified or Radiance, in this case you get X stacks of this buff to summon a ghostly tentacle, which strongly reinforces the theme of the character and brings the presence of the ghost tentacles to every weapon, becoming almost synonymous with the Captain.
Check out the video below for some cursed gameplay: Gunpowder is also a new trait being introduced to the game, where a skill is no longer launched automatically, but instead, it consumes your Ammunition buff and is launched 5 times. We really like the concept of Ammunition, but if you made an ammunition stacking build before, you probably have had situations where you just stacked too much and couldn't spend all your ammunition. It is also sad when an uninspiring skill ends up consuming ammunition instead of your heavy hitter, and Gunpowder allowed us to create a sort of "Ammunition finisher" skill, that is super powerful and synergizes really well with a lot of what is already in the game, such as Ammo Box, and also opens up opportunities for other similar effects in the future, skills that depend on something to be used instead of just being automatically casted.
Check out this video below of gunpowder gameplay:
We hope that the cursed captain brings interesting and fun new gameplay for all to enjoy! We hope you all have fun with it. And as always, we’d love to hear your thoughts! Let us know in the comments!
We hope you are having a lovely day or night,
~ The Soulstone Team
Major Update: Cursed Fleet
Hello Survivors! :cozyroe:
The Cursed Fleet is finally here as our 14th major update! Explore new builds with the Cursed Captain, runes, artifact powers, skills, and a lot more!
2 Years Anniversary Celebration
Soulstone Survivors is completing 2 years of Early Access today!! We still cannot believe how far the game has come, with 14 MAJOR updates and more content than we can mention here! To celebrate we are giving a 30% discount on the game and creating a new bundle with the awesome Atomic Picnic, a third person Action Roguelite with crazy smooth visuals and gameplay that just released TODAY, check out the bundle to get it at an extra 10% off!!
You will also find some cool anniversary decorations in the game's menu from November 7th to December 9th!
New Character - The Cursed Captain
The cursed fleet is here, and with it the new Void Hunter, the Cursed Captain! With a pistol in one hand and a cutlass in another, the Captain has a unique combination of melee and ranged attacks, combined with the powers harnessed from his eternal curse.
Now you can craft new weapons, unlock unique skills, runes and command your own Ghost Ship into battle!
New Buff - Cursed
Along with the Cursed Captain we are introducing a new buff to the game! Accumulate stacks of Cursed to summon a powerful ghostly tentacle to fight for you for a limited time!
New Skill Trait - Gunpowder
We are also introducing a new Skill Trait to the game called Gunpowder! Currently exclusive to the new Gunpowder Burst skill, these skills are not used on a cooldown, instead they stop all your other skills from consuming Ammunition, being used every time you accumulate 20 Ammunition for a crazy burst of damage!
New Artifact Powers
You can now unlock the Artifact Powers for the Cursed Captain, Pyromancer and Arcane Weaver by upgrading their weapons to the Artifact rarity!
New Blacksmith UI
Over time the Blacksmith UI became more and more cluttered with recipes, skill details, artifact power and so on, and it was time to tidy up the workshop! The new revised UI aims to clean up the visuals considerably, making this screen a lot less overwhelming than before while still allowing you to see all the information you need.
Further Performance improvements
We continue on our journey to improve the game’s performance across the board. With this update we are bringing a few big updates once again, improving the collision detection of some skills, changing how we update scripts for faster runtime, but the biggest change is related to the XP Crystals! We had shown this video in a previous Devlog (which we recommend you check out), but take a look at the difference! Before: After:
General changes and fixes:
Added new Corrupted Demon Hunter and Corrupted Cursed Captain enemies;
Added more stats of the Unholy Cathedral to the Profile tab, highlighting your best matches and graphs;
Fixed a critical issue where if you had an error with part of your save files, you could have a weapon that was upgraded, but was still showing as locked, putting the game in a bugged scenario;
Fixed an issue where the Divine Legacy rune would not guarantee high rarity power ups if you banished all legendary power ups. It should try to always offer the highest rarity possible;
Fixed an issue where skills would not count as “sources of buffs or debuffs” after being used once, causing the game to not show you the power ups it should;
Fixed an issue where summon skills would count as multiple sources of the same buff/debuff, causing inconsistent behaviours especially once removed;
Fixed an issue where Pillars were not classed as Elite, and therefore not prioritized by Cunning summons;
Fixed an issue where Egg Shooter would not scale with cast frequency and multicast properly, which will make it much more powerful now;
Fixed an issue where Fan of Bombs and other similar skills like Carnage would not work properly with VERY high cast frequency and multicast chance, being much more powerful now;
Fixed an issue where the Death Knight would get Swift power ups, despite being unable to dash;
Fixed an issue where the visibility slider would impact the amount of summoned entities by skills such as Spider Cocoon (spawning less than intended);
Fixed an issue where Rolling Boulder had 20 seconds cooldown, instead of the intended 6, making it a lot worse than intended;
Fixed an issue where with the Ready for Battle rune, more skills would be offered in the Unholy Cathedral than intended, causing errors;
Fixed an issue where Reroll did not use the “input cooldown” in the level up screen, leading to accidental rerolls;
Fixed multiple gamepad related issues in the skill tree which could lead to inconsistent navigation;
Fixed an issue where the Ascended skin would disappear from your skill tree if you reset a character’s skill tree;
Fixed an issue where if you restarted a match after completing its objective, but before entering a portal, could cause issues;
Fixed an issue where certain skills would stop hitting small enemies due to how they were scaling with Area;
Fixed an issue where Keythaiz Lightning Bomb attack would deal damage in an area larger than the visual would indicate;
Fixed an issue where the Profile matches tab wouldn’t work as intended if there were matches with corrupted saved data;
Fixed an issue with lighting in the Low and Very Low presets, which were causing strange artifacts;
Fixed an issue where Void would not cause Doom damage, only direct damage instead;
Fixed an issue where the game could be showing the incorrect skill tooltip in the “skill replacement” window during level up;
Fixed an issue where the number of Lords of the Void eliminated in the Unholy Cathedral was not showing correctly;
Fixed an issue where the Elementalist Fire Foxes are now properly removed across Unholy Cathedral cycles;
Fixed an issue where the Unholy Cathedral tooltip would show “Rare” materials instead of Common and Uncommon materials (visual error only);
Fixed an issue where Elemental Flow rune was twice as effective as it should be (100% faster tick rate on negative effects instead of 50%). Implementation has been fixed, but effect has been increased to compensate for the fix;
Removed the Area skill type from Scent of Blood since it is not applied in an area;
EDIT: Hotfix Update 14f2:
Added option to enable or disable the Physics CPU Limit option. It is enabled by default as it usually makes the game run smoother, but can be experimented with on a case by case scenario. We recommend leaving this option ENABLED;
Fixed a few gamepad navigation issues on the Skill Tree;
Fixed sensitivity of the scroll wheel in the new Blacksmith Materials tab;
Minor fix to the layout of the Runes tab;
Fixed issue where Lord of the Void materials would not display tooltips consistently;
We hope you will enjoy this update while we continue working hard for the next one! There is still a TON of stuff coming, so keep an eye out! We will make an announcement here on Steam with an updated roadmap so you have a better idea of what to expect!
Community Event: Meme-off
Did you know we are currently holding a meme-off community event? Check out our Discord community and share your joys and frustrations as memes to win gift cards and game keys! If you want to learn more head over to our Discord!
Finally, if you would like to receive updates like this one via email, we would also like to invite you to our new mailing list! We are still to send our first email, but that will be a great way to get news about the game and overall studio if you are interested in what we might have store in the future!
As always we wanted to thank you all very much for your support!
Have a great day!
~Soulstone Team
Meme-Off Event!
Hello Void Hunters!
We thought it was about time we laid off the monster-fighting for a little bit and gathered around a campfire for a lighthearted
🎉Soulstone Survivors Meme-Off!🎉
Ready to unleash your inner thoughts through your stand-up comedian persona? Ok, maybe not all of your thoughts… Then join us on our discord server to know more by clicking the link for a community meme event dedicated to all things Soulstone Survivors with a chance to get steam gift cards or a game key as prizes!
The Prizes:
🥇 1st place - 20$ STEAM GIFT CARD
🥈 2nd place - 15$ STEAM GIFT CARD
🥉 3rd place - 10$ STEAM GIFT CARD
🎟️ 4th place - Soulstone Survivors Game Key, chosen randomly between all participants
🎟️ 5th place - Soulstone Survivors Game Key, chosen randomly between all participants
📅Event Date: Friday, 1 November 2024 - Friday, 15 November 2024 🔥Winners Revealed: Monday, 18 November 2024
Devlog #9 - Sneak Peeks and Character Design!
Welcome to another Soulstone Survivors devlog! Today we got some interesting stuff to share. A sneak peak of a new character, a new debuff, new soundtrack and more!
As we progress further into development, we also invite you to sign up to our new mailing list and be among the first to find out when its released!
Sneak Peeks
Colombo and Alex have been working on some new, interesting stuff. Lets just say that this one is a boney one… can you guess which character this will be? Let us know in the comments! We also thought it would be really cool to share another little secret. After working on this new feature, Lucas has reported he has been having some weird dreams… finding a lot of black cats on the street… we still have no idea why…
Options Reorganized
Over time we have added a ton of options for you to play with in the Options menu and it was getting pretty cluttered, so for the next update Juan has worked on reorganizing and fixing a few minor issues with this panel, check it out:
New Death Soundtrack
We are also fans of Gama’s work here at the Game Smithing office and he has been cooking up a new soundtrack for the sad moment in the game where you get unalived, and he wanted to share a small sample of what he got in the works:
Behind The Scenes of Void Hunters Design
Since you all seemed to enjoy our beautiful sketch of the Unholy Cathedral boss and fight, we though of sharing even more sketches! This time around, we wanted to talk about how we approach character design! At this stage in the game, when designing a new character we generally start by first looking at what skill types and fantasies are under represented in the existing characters, to help us guide the theme and what sort of mechanics will be expected.
“What if the thing went around and as you move it keeps its distance…?”
Once those are defined, we make a high level decision about the theme and name of the class this Void Hunter will represent and what weapons it will use, but still subject to change. Once we are happy, the first thing we decide is the character’s ascension, which helps us nail down exactly what the general theme of the character will be both for gameplay mechanics and visuals. For the Demon Hunter, for example, we wanted a Void Hunter that uses ranged weapons but also dips into chaotic magic, so the class felt like an obvious answer. Our theme for the Demon Hunter is a Void Hunter that through his mastery of hunting the most corrupted demons of the void, learned to harness this same power and even control said demons to do his bidding, but still resists the temptation to become corrupted himself.
“… then maybe the thing makes these cross yellow lines (that I dont want to spoil what they represent) go that direction? / ah yeah, that would be awesome!”
After that is out of the way, we start talking about the skills themselves. At this point we already know what skill types each weapon will have, and these will have a big impact not only on the visual theme of the skill but also in what the skill does, mechanically speaking.
Designing skills is actually quite challenging, since we have to be mindful of our game’s limitations, such as the top down point of view, auto casted skills, crazy scaling over a match, performance implications and how often each skill gets used, etc. At this point we try to come up with unique mechanics that feel refreshing to play with, but that also can fill gaps in our huge roster of skills, thinking not only of how the skills will work but how they compliment the existing content in the game. This is usually a very long process, and in the end we hope it turns out to be a fun new character!
This was all we had for today! Hope you enjoyed what we had to show. Keep an eye out for news, I have a feeling you won’t regret it. Let us know what you would like us to talk about next!
We hope you all have a lovely day or night,
~Soulstone Team
New Soulstone Brigade Bundle!
Hello Survivors! :cozyroe:
We are happy to announce that together with our friends at Bolt Blaster Games we are making a Soulstone Survivors x The Spell Brigade bundle on Steam! We hope you will have a lot of fun playing both of the games!
Devlog #8 - New skills, effect optimizations and game design!
Welcome to another Soulstone Survivors devlog! Today we got some cool stuff to share with you about performance but also about how we work together as a team, so if you are curious about game development this might be a cool one for you!
As we get progress further into development, we also invite you to sign up to our new mailing list and be among the first to find out when its released!
Reducing quantity of particle systems
Almost every special effect you see in the game, such as explosions, trails, slashes… are made out of multiple particle systems. We can create really cool visual effects with them, however they can really become a hit to performance.
Fellipe, one of our programmers has come up with a cool solution: normally if you want to play the same effect in two different positions, you will have two separate particle effects, one in each position, doing their own thing. However, there is a way that we can essentially “play” just one effect, in two (or many) different positions at the same time.
When you are talking about 1 or 2 particle effects this wont make much of a difference, but when you are talking about thousands of arrows hitting enemies such as in Storm of Arrows… we can convert literally dozens of thousands of particle systems into a single one that is played thousands of times, allowing Unity to perform additional internal optimizations to their rendering and processing. Check out the difference it makes with the two videos below:
Before After With the new changes, we have one single Particle System, and every time we need to play said effect, we can do so a lot more efficiently without changing anything in the visuals of said effects.
New Projectile Type
Juan and Lucas have been working on a new projectile type, which we are internally calling “swarming projectiles”. Check out this video of the new projectile type in action! The skill in the video uses placeholder visuals but you can expect it to make an appearance very soon!
Build Tools
If you are a game developer or just interested in how the sausage gets made, this section will certainly be interesting to you.
As you may know, we currently support 3 versions of the game: Full, Prologue and the Demo. For each of these versions, we currently support 3 platforms: Windows, Mac and Linux. This means that we often have to make 9 builds of our project to test everything before submitting it to Steam. Each of these builds have a different set of configuration parameters. Needless to say, making a batch of builds is not only time-consuming but also error-prone.
To solve this issue, we’ve recently developed an internal build tool to help us manage and automate this process: With this tool we are now able to configure and build many builds — all 9 configurations in fact — at once, with just one click. The tool takes care of the game configuration for the given flavor, distribution channel and flags. If you are interested in more behind-the-scenes stuff, do let us know, we’d love to share more of this stuff with you!
Behind the scenes of Mh’thaeus Design
We thought it would be really cool to show the really simple sketch we made in our initial design discussion of how the Unholy Cathedral boss and fight would work. We gather the team together and we start throwing ideas out, thinking of how the arena must be shaped, how skills interact with each other, how the boss skills will interact with the different void hunters (such as the Death Knight that doesnt have dodge)… and then we start pulling back and filtering into mechanics that seem like will work well together! Check out the beautiful art below by Allan, our not artist! (please don’t bully us for our amazing drawing skills =P and don't mind the Portuguese!) This was all we had for today folks! Hope you enjoyed what we had to show. Keep an eye out for news, it might be worth your while... Let us know what you would like us to talk about next!
We hope you all have a lovely day or night,
~Soulstone Team
Devlog #7 - New Character, New rune and New Models!
Welcome to another Soulstone Survivors devlog! Last week we released our latest update, Embrace of Chaos so right now you can see in-game some of the work we have been working on for a while, but there is still a lot of work in progress going on for the next few updates!
As a reminder we also wanted to invite you to sign up to our new mailing list, we haven't even used it yet haha but if you are interested in our games, thats the place to be!
While we continue to focus heavily on more performance changes, we are still not ready to show some of the cooler things we are doing, however there is more to the game than performance! Check these out!
New Character Sneak Peek
We have been hard at work developing our next, upcoming character! We already have a lot of its functionality ready, still developing new code for some skills, new runes... and we think a lot of you will be excited for this one! We still want to make it a surprise though, so... can you guess what the next character is judging only from these props here?? Let us know your guess in the comments!
Demon Hunter Behind the Scenes
In the process of making the little videoclip intro for the demon hunter, Colombo, our 3D artists, faced some… unique scaling issues to make everything work properly, check out this behind the scenes of the process of making the intro for the demon hunter: We also thought it would be cool to show some amazing concept art of the Demon Hunter, done by Alex, our 2D artist, check it out! And that's all we can show for this one! We have been putting a lot of work into the new content that will be coming to the game not only in this next update but a couple of future ones, so we don't want to reveal too much too soon!
We are working on a new State of the Game video to be published next week where we will discuss everything that is going on in more detail so if you are interested keep an eye out here and on our YouTube channel!
We hope you all have a lovely day or night,
~Soulstone Team
Major Update: Embrace of Chaos
Hello Survivors! :cozyroe:
Feel the Embrace of Chaos as our 13th major update lands with a new character! Not only that but it also comes with new Artifact Powers and huge performance improvements!
New Character - The Demon Hunter
The Demon Hunter has arrived, a master of ranged combat and chaos itself. Armed with dual crossbows, they bring a new level of lethality to the Void Hunters. Their swift, critical strikes are as unpredictable as they are devastating, making them the ultimate predator of the void.
You can now craft his new weapons and use the new unique skills, runes and of course try his powerful new Ascension!
New Artifact Powers
You can now unlock the Artifact Powers for the Demon Hunter, Hound Master and Spellblade by upgrading their weapons to the Artifact rarity!
Major Performance reworks
While last update saw a few localized performance improvements, this time around we have a few major system refactors that were in the works for a long time making their way into the game. These should considerably improve the FPS of the game in most scenarios, especially very late game such as high Endless and Overlord. Here’s a quick summary of those changes:
Negative effects almost entirely refactored to use every last bit of performance possible. Should make a big difference for builds that rely heavily on them;
New collision detection system for almost every skill in the game. Should provide major improvements in very hectic scenarios. Will have close to no affect for projectile heavy skills, like Storm of Arrows, but all others should be considerably faster;
Considerably reduced the disc size of the game for faster download;
Considerably reduced amount of memory used by the game, which not only should make it overall faster but more stable especially in late game scenarios;
General changes and fixes:
Changed how Brittle is calculated under the hood. It no longer benefits from your stats and skill modifiers twice, being now more in line with all other damage increasing negative effects in the game;
New intro animation for the existing hidden bosses;
Fixed an issue that cased the negative effect Wound to not work (currently applied only by one of the Hound Master’s dogs);
Fixed Spinning Staff tooltip which was scaling incorrectly;
Player target areas (blue circles) no longer show in Endless and Overlord cycles, to reduce the visual clutter;
Added a counter of the number of summoned units to the Artifact Power interface;
Fixed an issue where in a very specific scenario the Endless/Overlord completion percentage would not be saved properly in your player profile;
Fixed a pathfinding issue for enemies in the Dungeon of Despair;
Fixed an issue where Lord of the Void statues could be “lying down”;
Fixed an issue where if your health went negative in the Unholy Cathedral with unique power ups, the display could bug and end up showing a very high number instead;
Fixed an issue where the Assassin mission text was not being localized;
Fixed an issue in the Unholy Cathedral where buffs from the previous cycle would not be reset when starting a new cycle;
Fixed an issue where Chaos Golems would not be able to move in the second stage of the Unholy Cathedral;
Fixed an issue where skills that had “sub projectiles” like Surprise Gift or Noxious Shot would count as more than 1 source of their respective negative effects;
Fixed an issue were in very specific scenarios skills like Icy Veins would not work at all, leading to strange errors;
Multiple small fixes and improvements in the UI;
We hope you will enjoy this update as we are already working hard on new content for the next one! Performance has been a big focus for us but there is still a bunch of stuff coming! We will update our roadmap shortly after this update, where we will discuss in more detail what is coming, what plans changed and the path forward, so if you would like to check it out keep an eye out for our announcements here!
Community Event: Big Damage
To celebrate the new update we will also be running an old favourite in our Discord community, the Big Damage event! Come up with the build that deals the most damage possible in 10 minutes, send your results and win gift cards and game keys! If you want to learn more head over to our Discord!
Finally, if you would like to receive updates like this one via email, we would also like to invite you to our new mailing list! We are still to send our first email, but that will be a great way to get news about the game and overall studio if you are interested in what we might have store in the future!
As always we wanted to thank you all very much for your support!
Have a great day!
~Soulstone Team
Devlog #6 - XP Crystals, New Model and New Blacksmith UI
Welcome to the sixth Soulstone Survivors devlog!! You are about to witness some work in progress of a new skill, performance improvements and some changes to how the crafting UI looks.
Next major update is already getting closer and closer, so we also invite you to sign up to our new mailing list and be among the first to find out when its released!
Performance Improvements - XP Crystals
Before we get to the good stuff, lets get the usual performance update out of the way. This time around we are going to be looking at changes made to the XP crystals. During a match, players can sometimes accumulate many hundreds or even thousands of XP crystals laying around on the map and this can lead to significant performance degradation.
Luckily, the XP crystals have a very well defined behavior which is very suitable for some pretty neat optimizations. Check out the results we got from said optimizations:
Before
After
In these videos you can see me spawning 100k XP crystals on a 50 meter radius around the player. Before the changes, my machine could barely handle it, running the game at single-digit FPS whereas after the changes it has no problem at all, reaching over 100 FPS.
Now for the nerds in all of us, a big, but not the only reason why these crystals are so much lighter now is the rendering. Before we were using vanilla Unity rendering techniques (i.e.: mesh renderers). But now, put it a different way, we tell the GPU: “here, render 100k copies of this object”, as opposed to “render some here, some other here, another there…”.
Now, we manually render all of the crystals using GPU instancing, which allows us to render every crystal at once, reducing the overhead. Check out these visual examples below:
Unity Vanilla Rendering
The New Approach
The top version is Unity’s vanilla rendering: it takes 3 draw-calls to render the crystals; where the bottom gif with the new approach only takes 1 draw-call to render all of them.
New Upcoming Skill
We have also been working on some new skills recently and our artists have been doing an awesome job on those and we often need new 3D models for them. Check out this 3D model for an upcoming new skill:
Visual Changes in the Blacksmith UI
Lucas, one of our programmers has been working on how the crafting tab currently looks, to improve its readability. Check out the screenshot below to see how that is going: And this was all we had to show for this Devlog! We have been hard at work to improve performance, UI visibility and new skills. But keep an eye out for news because we have some really cool stuff coming... Let us know what you would like us to talk about next!
We hope you all have a lovely day or night,
~Soulstone Team
Devlog #5 - Performance, quality of life and... new map!?
Welcome to the fifth Soulstone Survivors Devlog! Today we are breaking the rules!! We are always working on quite a few things at the same time, and we usually avoid showing stuff that is still very early or experimental or super placeholder, but today in addition to the usual stuff, we wanted to share a little something we have been working on in the background, so if you are interested in learning more, this devlog is for you!
Next major update is already getting closer and closer, so we also invite you to sign up to our new mailing list and be among the first to find out when its released!
Performance Improvements
But first… let’s talk a bit about the boring but crucial stuff! As you might know we have been putting a lot of effort into improving the game’s overall performance and we believe most of you will notice a considerable difference with the next update! Let’s take a look at the numbers we got so far.
Build sizes
Improving the memory footprint of the game has been a big focus for us. It helps the game run faster, prevents crashes related to memory, and has one extra benefit: much smaller build sizes! Here is a comparison of what Update 11 vs Update 13 (the next update) looks like:
As you can see, a zipped build of our game went from 3.46GB to 1.44GB. This means that downloading the game is faster and it takes less space on your machine. And this includes a bunch of new content we’ve added to the game since!
Memory footprint
Now lets take a look at the actual memory being used shall we? All of the data was captured running at native 4k, all graphics maxed out:
Before: After:
The images above show a profile capture of 2 runs. These captures show 2000 frames worth of data captured at around the 10 min mark into a curse 62 run with the Engineer. The total memory usage went down from 3.09GB to 2.55GB, approximately 20% less memory than before. As the match progresses deeper and deeper into endless, that difference is greater and greater since a lot of the optimizations have been made with crazy scenarios in mind.
Frame-time performance
We have also made some frame-time improvements that will hopefully make a noticeable different when we release the next update. Here’s a comparison of what’ve accomplished so far on the perf side:
To read the data above, Left Median represents the median time in milliseconds per frame on the previous update, and Right Median the time on the next update. Each image represents the comparison between two runs with the same build, in very similar gameplay scenarios.
As you can see from the data, in a very high end spec PC the game ran 13.06% faster, while in another, still very good PC, the game ran 38.75% faster. Since the game can be very taxing on your CPU, the improvements you will see will depend a lot on your specs, especially on your processor, and will also vary between characters and builds, but you can expect to see double-digit frame-time improvements in general.
Once Update 13 is live, we’d love to hear your experience regarding performance, so if you see improvements — or lack thereof — we’d love to hear from you on steam forums or discord.
Player skill target area
A new quality of life improvement that has been requested many, many times is also making it’s way into the game. We now hide the player’s skill target areas (the blue circles) in endless and overlord cycles. While these markers are useful in the beginning of a match when you are trying to make the most of your skills, they get redundant later on when you are pretty much blowing the whole map at once, so this change should improve overall visibility. Check out this comparison clip down below:
And finally…
… the new, experimental and STILL IN DEVELOPMENT thing we are working on! As you may know from our previous videos and devlogs, new game modes are something we have been working on for a while, with the Unholy Cathedral being the first one to appear… but definitely not the only one in the works!
The clip below doesn’t show much and might look a bit boring haha, but don’t be fooled by its simplicity! What we are developing is essentially a tool that allows us to create structured, hand made content, not just for one, but possibly different game modes in the future. It’s still VERY EARLY and in an experimental stage, changing a little every day as we develop new maps and challenges, but if you pay attention to the little details in the video you might get some ideas of the type of stuff that is in the works. We often say there is still a lot coming to the game, and trust me when I say its not just characters and skills! We are excited about all the possibilities that this system is already opening up, and who knows, maybe we will share some more sneak peeks at a later date of the sort of stuff we are creating with it!
This was all we had to show for today’s Devlog! Performance has been a big priority for us recently, but we also have been working on some pretty cool new stuff... Let us know what you would like us to talk about next and what you are currently excited to get your hands on!
