Genre: Role-playing (RPG), Hack and slash/Beat 'em up, Indie, Arcade
Soulstone Survivors
Devlog #4 - Fixes, improvements and... new character?!?
Welcome to our fourth Soulstone Survivors Devlog! As we continue to work on delivering the next major update, In this devlog you are going to catch a glimpse of some exciting sneak peeks and some stuff we have been working on.
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!
Sneak Peek: New character
Alex, one of our artists has been working on some pretty amazing new concept art for our next upcoming character… we don't want to spoil the surprise too much at this stage but... check these new weapons out! What do you reckon this character could be?
Sneak Peek: New projectile skill behavior
Fellipe just finished creating some new projectile behaviors, that you may or may not see soon with some new content that is coming... PS, visuals are placeholder!
Performance: Stuttering and fps issues
Our last update brought with it a few performance improvements specially around memory, but some players noticed a decrease in performance. We have been hard at work using every tool at our disposal to investigate, replicate and fix these issues, and for the next update we already have a few major changes that should bring considerable performance improvements, we will talk more about those in the next devlog!
However, one curious issue we finally addressed that could cause a bit of "random" stuttering, is related to the destructible objects in the scenario and minerals. To alleviate this, we considerably simplified their colliders and fragments, and made the code controlling those parts a lot simpler, making those essentially free during gameplay. Here is a before and after image of what this looks like. Here you can check out a video of how it was before and how it is now in-game.
Quality of life: Locked power ups
Lucas has been working on something that the players have been asking for. Your locked skills and power ups will no longer be consumed by replacing your choices with passive power-ups (but will still be consumed in every other scenario, like rerolls, etc). You can check that out in the video below:
The Unholy Cathedral soundtrack
Now that the Unholy Cathedral is released, Gama, our sound expert, wanted to share a few more details about everything that went into its creation, so here are a few words directly from Gama:
"The Cathedral music theme was defined to be an obscure kind of “church music”, filled with organs and voices. Here is a little video to illustrate these:" "As we have 5 different cycles before facing the final boss, we created 5 different music arrangements. With each cycle the music grows in complexity, to try and help convey the idea that the stakes are getting higher. Here’s a small sample of the dynamic music for the normal music working:" "For the first time we also played with a spacial soundtrack, with an extra organ layer which is attached to the actual organ located inside the cathedral, so if you walk around the scenario and into the altar, you will hear more and more of this layer." "We got plenty of other ideas to explore for the new content we are developing and Im excited to see how those will turn out!"
Pssss, too soon to be sharing stuff about that Gama! Ahem... I guess it's better we finish this devlog here! Is there anything you would like us to talk about? Let us know in the comments below! There is still a ton of exciting stuff coming and I personally think it's going to be legendary!
We hope you all have a lovely day or night,
~Soulstone Team
Update 12 - Hotfix 4 - Fixed another crashing issue
Hey everyone!
We just released EA Update 12h, which should address any remaining crashing issues. As you may imagine by now, these are not trivial issues and not easy to detect, as they do not affect most of the player base and we ourselves are not able to reproduce them consistently, so we would appreciate the continued feedback if you are still experiencing crashes with the latest build.
If you do still have problems, please contact us at support@gamesmithing.com or directly on our Discord, as we will need more details such as log and save files to try and reproduce these problems locally.
We appreciate the help and the patience and apologise for the repeated updated, trust me when I say it is not a pleasant experience for us either haha but we will keep working until we root out any remaining problems.
Hope you have a great day,
~Soulstone Team
Update 12 - Hotfix 3 - More Performance and Crashes
Hey everyone!
Once again we have just released EA Update 12g, another small hotfix update for the Unholy Cathedral update released this Monday. This is a small update that addresses the following:
- Fixed issue with certain enemies, bosses and effects causing stutters in certain situations (that could seem random);
- Fixed issue that would cause the game to crash in specific scenarios related to Poison effects (would also seem very random, not happen every time you use poison, but from our tests should be the issue some of you are having); - Fixed an issue where you could lock an active skill in the Unholy Cathedral, and end up not being able to equip it if you were full of skills already; - Fixed a small issue with Explosive Goblins causing errors;
Once again this version should greatly increase the performance issues some of you are feeling. This time around the culprit were configuration issues in very specific prefabs, which is why they wouldnt happen reliably depending on map and time of a match. If you still experience issues after playing on this version, please do let us know!
Hope you have a great day,
~Soulstone Team
Update 12 - Hotfix 2 - Addressing Performance
Hey everyone!
We have just released EA Update 12d this time around, which is yet another small hotfix update for the Unholy Cathedral update released last night. This is a small update that addresses the following:
- Fixed issue with abnormal effects causing stutters in certain situations;
This version should greatly increase the performance issues some of you are feeling, which was related to untimely memory allocations. If you still experience issues after playing on this version, please do let us know!
Hope you have a great day,
~Soulstone Team
Update 12 - Hotfix 1
Hey everyone!
We have just released EA Update 12c, a small hotfix update for the Unholy Cathedral update released last night. This is a small update that addresses the following:
- Fixed an issue where the game could crash with certain character and rune combinations when trying to level up; - Fixed an issue where Bumble, the secret boss, would not spawn properly; - Fixed audio issues for Mac users; - Made a change that should reduce stuttering for those experiencing it. We are working on another change that will go live later today as we believe we have identified an issue that occurs on certain devices;
Please as always do let us know if you run into any issues with the latest update, we are watching and working to address any of the issues that appear as fast as we can!
Hope you have a great day,
~Soulstone Team
Zombies 'n Soulstones Bundle + Midweek Deal
Hello Survivors! :cozyroe:
To celebrate our new major update, the Unholy Cathedral, we have not just one, but two special discounts for you and your friends!
Soulstone Survivors is now 35% off for a week, and you can get it even cheaper with our new Zombies n' Soulstones bundle together with Yet Another Zombie Survivors, another amazing bullet heaven with a lot of depth! Check out the bundle below:
As always, thank you very much for your support!
Have a great weekend!
~Soulstone Survivors Team
Major Update: The Unholy Cathedral
Hello Survivors! :cozyroe:
The Unholy Cathedral, our 12th major update is finally here, and this update brings a lot of new content and improvements, including a new game mode, major ascensions changes and a lot of performance improvements!
New Game Mode - The Unholy Cathedral
Venture into the Unholy Cathedral and face a challenge like none before! You will need to master each character, exploring all the possible builds and variations that they bring, all culminating into an epic battle against the heretic himself!
Major Ascension improvements
While Ascensions are meant to be different, our goal is to make sure that all ascensions are incredible power boosts during a match and always interesting to go after. With that goal we have implemented major improvements to a few ascensions that were in dire need, you can check out all the changes below!
New Artifact Powers
The Barbarian and the Sentinel now have access to brand new powers with their Artifact Weapons! These powerful skills become available whenever you upgrade their weapons to the Artifact rarity and can provide a significant boost to power! More artifact powers will be coming with future updates!
Performance improvements (more still coming)
This update brings the first step into a ton of upcoming performance improvements. Hopefully you will notice that the gameplay is smoother including in deeper endless runs. The game should use considerably less memory an overall feel better to play. There are still major performance improvements coming (such as the collision detection we mentioned in our devlog, which is still not present in this update), so keep an eye for the next update!
New Skill Trait: Cunning
Multiple Summon skills now have the new Cunning trait, where units summoned prioritize high value targets such as Elite enemies and Lords of the Void. This trait is now commonly found in most damage focused summon skills and should make summoning skills even more powerful than before.
Ascension changes:
The Necromancer and all of its summons now gain multiplicative stats based on how many abominations are currently active, making it considerably stronger than before;
The Death Knight and all of its summons now gain multiplicative stats based on how many Ebon Knights are currently active, making it considerably stronger than before;
The Beastmaster’s footprints now have a tracker even when they are on your screen, making them much easier to find. They are now also closer to each other, and avoid being too close to walls;
The Beastmaster now requires 8 footprints, down from 10, to spawn exotic beasts. Exotic Beasts now have the Cunning trait as well, making them considerably stronger than before;
The Pyromancer now gains concentration twice as fast, and loses half as much when taking damage;
The Pyromancer’s skill Draconic Flames can now be aimed, instead of being fired at a random target, making it considerably stronger than before;
The Chaoswalker’s altars now have a much smaller and smoother collision profile, and should not get in the way as much as before;
The Chaoswalker now gains Chaos Energy twice as fast;
General changes and fixes:
Added new options in the Fight panel to allow you to disable individual pieces of your meta progression, so you can customize how you play;
Changed the Engineer individual skill tree node from granting Mineral drop bonuses to granting Attack Speed (making it so engineer no longer have a slight increase in material gains compared to other characters);
Fixed an issue where Dazed was not having any effect on enemies, should now work as intended;
Fixed an issue where Distracted and Debilitated were not being calculated properly, making them more effective than they should be especially in endless and overlord runs;
Fixed an issue where you would get more Artifact Power than intended with every Endless or Overlord map;
Fixed an issue where multiple instances of a certain Synergy power up would count as multiple sources of a debuff, for example, picking Hypothermia twice would count as two sources of Disarray, when it should only count as one;
Fixed an issue where the “More Details” key bind would not work as intended. Requires a new key bind to be set to fix the issue if you had this problem;
Fixed an issue where skill tree nodes that boosted your ascension could fail to load (not common but could happen);
Implemented visual improvements for a few skills that would very early entirely hide red damage areas, such as Blizzard and Ice Vortex;
Fixed an issue with a Myrmidon’s skill tree node granting much more critical chance than it should;
Fixed the damage areas of a few basic and elite enemies that were unable to cause damage;
Fixed an issue where Electrified could be consumed without properly releasing its burst of energy;
Fixed an issue where the Hound Master dogs would not properly receive stats from the skill tree;
Fixed an issue where certain effects would remain in the scene indefinitely;
Changed the name of the underlying skills related to Icy Veins, Purity, Electrified and Radiance to reflect the name of the buff, so it is easier to understand;
Minor fixes all across the game;
Added the Cunning trait to the following Summon skills:
Death Knight’s Ebon Knights
Beastmaster’s Exotic Beasts
Beastmaster’s Wolves (Skill Tree)
Monkey King’s Black Clones
Myrmidon’s Loyal Servants
Hound Master’s Dogs
Chaos Totem
Cobra Totem
EZ Mechanical Spider
EZ Sentry
Fiery Blades
Frost Totem
Summon Assassin Enclave
Summon Ballista
Summon Helper Elves
Summon Infantry
Summon Putrid Hounds
Summon Skeletal Archers
Summon Skeletal Warrior
Summon Spider Queen
Summon War Tiger
We hope you will enjoy all the new content added with this update and do let us know in the comments below what you think!
If you'd like to keep up to date with major updates and other big announcements from us, we also want to invite you to sign up to our new mailing list!
Thank you all very much for your support and we hope to see you in the next one, there is a lot of cool stuff still in the oven!
Have a great day!
~Soulstone Team
Devlog #3 - New skill trait, improved ascensions and more concepts!
Its now already our third Soulstone Survivors devlog (which feels crazy how fast time goes by!), and everyone at the studio continues to work hard to deliver our next upcoming update! There is a lot going on in preparation for the next update and today we want to share some of the cool stuff coming soon, but without spoiling too much!
As we get closer and closer to the next update, we also invite you to sign up to our new mailing list and be among the first to find out when its released!
New Summon Trait: Cunning
In the next update, a lot of summon skills, especially the ones more focused on dealing damage, will have the new Cunning trait. The units summoned by these skills will prioritize high value targets, such as Lords of the Void and Elite enemies, making them excellent at bringing down threats.
You can notice in the video below that our wolves, tigers and queen spiders immediately switch targets to the Lord of the Void as soon as it spawns, and then go back to their usual massacre afterwards. The moose which are tanks without the Cunning trait, continue as they were. A few words from Allan: “We have received requests since the beginning of time to make summons easier to manage, but we don't want to add any sort of direct control or make a more complicated control scheme. This trait which we can sprinkle onto specific summons felt like a good middle ground, where you probably still want a few regular summons to deal with the hordes and a few specialized at eliminating bosses.”
Major Ascension Improvements
Another big change coming in the next update in terms of gameplay are much needed ascension improvements. We know that across all characters some ascensions feel a lot better than others, and we think you will enjoy the changes coming. Here are a few examples, with a few others being worked on.
Necromancer:
Now, in addition to being excellent tanks for the Necromancer and spreading a ton of poison all around, each abomination active also grants multiplicative stats to the Necromancer and all of its followers, including other summons, drastically increasing their effect.
Pyromancer
Now the Pyromancer generates twice as much concentration passively and loses less concentration when hit, making her power available much more often, but that's not all! You can now aim the Draconic Flames, making it exceptional at killing Lords of the Void and highly resistant targets.
Beastmaster
Possibly the one where the difference will be most felt, the Beastmaster now requires 8 footprints down from 10, they spawn closer to each other making the path a lot easier to follow, and they have trackers visible even while on screen, making them much easier to find. The footprints now also avoid spawning too close to walls to avoid being hidden behind the scenario, and the Exotic Beasts now also have the new Cunning trait, making them extremely efficient. Few words from Allan (again): “We want ascensions to feel different to interact with. They are all meant to bring that rush of power that you actually feel during gameplay, but it is intentional that some of them require more involvement from the player and strategy, while others work almost automatically. We are also fine with the fact that certain ascensions might be better than others overall, but they all should feel rewarding to activate, and with the changes coming next update, I think we are getting closer to that goal.”
Update Trailer: Behind The Scenes
Alex has been working on some pretty amazing scenes, which include interesting camerawork, some unique character animations and a lot more! Check out a little bit of the behind the scenes and maybe a bit of an exclusive sneak peek on whats coming soon:
Myrmidon Concept Art
In our previous update, Alex also made some incredible concepts for our newest character, the Myrmidon. Check them out!
There is a bunch of exciting stuff we are working on right now but this is what we can show in today’s Devlog! We are super excited to see what everyone will think of the upcoming update and for the future of Soulstone Survivors!
Let us know in the comments which of these excites you the most and, if there is anything else you are curious about and would like us to showcase!
We hope you all have a lovely day or night,
-Soulstone Team
Devlog #2 - Concept art, better visibility and improvements!
Welcome to our second Soulstone Survivors Devlog!
This has been another busy week at the studio and while some stuff is still a secret we want to keep secret, we are super excited to share some of the cool stuff we are working on!
Dev Talk #3
We have recently released our 3rd Dev Talk on YouTube!! In these videos we talk about various aspects of the development of the game in detail and you might even catch some early sneak peeks about upcoming content in there! We have three of them up and running and you can expect more of them to come. Check it out below:
New Soundtrack
As we have showed in our previous Devlog, Gama has now finished the new soundtrack that is coming with some exciting new content for the game (which we don’t want to spoil just yet!), and we wanted to show you all a bit of the process of what it is like to record and edit it.
This is @lizett.ttwith her amazing voice, recording a part of the vocals that went into this track: And this is Gama himself, jamming to the beats in style: A few words from Gama “In this track, I recorded 2 singers, a girl from Ukraine and a guy from Belarus. Then, I recorded them several times and created a small choir. The main elements were the voice and the organ, heard in our last devlog, that fit very well with the next upcoming gameplay theme in mind.”
Automated Testing Framework
This is our brand new automated testing framework. Because of the sheer volume of player characters, enemies, summons, skills and so on, it is virtually impossible for us to manually test every combination of them to ensure the game is stable.
To help with this, Max, one of our programmers has been working on this tool which runs a whole lot of tests and tries to identify if something is not right. For example: we spawn/recycle every last entity in the game; cast every last skill; ask entities to move around the map, etc.
If anything goes wrong, the system can tell us what went wrong for example: an entity was unable to move in the expected time given its configured speed. Or an exception was thrown when spawning this entity.
These are essentially sanity checks which should catch most simple errors before they make their way to you folks. Over time, we plan to improve the tool to test more sophisticated scenarios and identify harder issues.
Memory Analysis and Improvements
Anderson, one of our programmers has been working on improving the memory consumption of the game. After a ton of memory profiling and analyzing a lot of data, we found a few surprising results and a few big wins we can address with changes to the code base, so hopefully we will be able to considerably reduce memory usage over the next few updates.
Character Concepts
Alex, our 2D artist has worked on a lot of the cool stuff we see in-game. He is currently working on some new super secret stuff, but today we wanted to showcase some of the Concept Art he has done for the Engineer character! Still talking about the art of the game, (Fernando) Colombo, our 3D artist also turns these stunning concepts into what we see in-game! Check it out:
Damage Area Visibility Improvements
Lucas, one of our programmers has been looking into an issue that has been pestering our players for a long time. Some of our skills VFX, more specifically Ice Vortex, Blizzard, Frozen Shard, Poison Puddle, Weaking Shot and Napalm Blast were overlapping with the damage areas which would make them hard to see at times. We’ve implemented a few changes to the shader code, and you can check out the before and after below:
A few words from Lucas "Damage areas being overlapped by VFX has always been an issue of the game and it can make the game way more difficult than it should be. With our push towards more production quality and polish, we are also working on these kinds of quirky problems.”
Meta Progression Toggle
Juan has now finished the implementation of this new feature that allows you to toggle multiple parts of your meta progression. With new UI and other user experience improvements such as proper controller support and further testing to verify all is working well.
This was all we had to show for today’s Devlog ya’ll! It has been a blast to be able to continue developing the game alongside our player base and we are very excited for the future of the game.
Let us know in the comments below which of these excites you the most and, if there is anything else you are curious about and would like us to showcase! 👀
We also want to remind you about our new mailing list!, You can sign up by clicking here!
We hope you all have a great day,
~ Soulstone Team
DevLog #1 - Soundtracks, performance and more!
Welcome to the first ever Soulstone Survivors Devlog!
With this new series, we want to bring you a bit closer to us, and share a little bit of everything that goes behind the scenes on the development of the game. We are working on a bunch of stuff but we made a special selection for today, so lets get started!
New Soundtrack and SFX
For the past few weeks, our sound expert and guru has been working on something GRAND!! To say the least. It does sound like I’m getting married on Halloween or something. Take a listen to this snippet of what he has been cooking:
A few words from Gama “In this part of the track that you just listened to, the voices are very evident, and might already give you a pretty good hint on what is coming, can you all guess what it could be? This track is the first time I’ve used breakcore and drum’n’bass elements together, so it has been really interesting to compose!”
Gama has also been working on new sound effects for the Myrmidon’s ascension that will be coming with the next update, check it out:
Performance Improvements - Collision Detection
Given how insanely the game can scale, we are working on a new collision detection system to be used by most of the skills in the game. This new system is multithreaded and will make much better use of your CPU, and while it is still in early tests, it is showing considerable gains so far:
While you can definitely see the difference in the video above, keep in mind that "FPS" is not a great metric for speed. A much better metric is "time per frame", and using our internal performance analysis tool, we can have a better idea of the actual results:
In this test, we can see that the average time per frame was reduced from 210ms to 35ms, 83% faster than before.
A few words from Allan “Please keep in mind these are still early tests, and these results will vary greatly based on your device and what skills are being used, but I must say I’m very excited with the results so far. Other folks on the team are working on different performance areas, so I’m confident that over the next few updates we can score some big wins in this sense!”
Quality of Life
Please, come in and don’t mind the placeholders. With this new UI feature Juan has been working on, you will finally be able to enable and disable various features the game has to offer such as your skill tree, central skill tree, weapon stats and so on, giving you a lot more control over how you play the game.
A few words from Juan “You will be able to play without all the different modifiers, and it's interesting to see how this affects and changes the gameplay. With everything enabled, the character becomes considerably stronger. Regarding the implementation, it was more about identifying where all the resources were added to the player and then enabling/disabling them individually and making sure only the right stuff gets applied. In the end you only really notice the colossal difference, especially with the skill tree, when you're without it!”
Better Communication
It has been quite a ride so far. The game has been changing a lot and we are continuing to work hard to deliver the best game we possibly can, but one crucial and very important change we want to make is to be more transparent and open with you, our community, about what we are currently working on, make sure that the curious minds can be satiated.
This devlog is the first step in our masterplan, but not all of it! We are planning a bunch of different stuff, including regularly scheduled Q&A’s, State of The Game videos, and will also be starting a new mailing list!
You can sign up to our new mailing listclicking here, even though it will probably be a little bit before we send out the first edition!
And of course, if you would like to see more posts like this, or have other ideas of things you would like to know from us, do let us know in the comments! We read... everything👀!
