Exciting news! You may have heard of the upcoming paid expansion for Starward Rogue, AuGMENTED. Well, we've decided to push the free content part of that a month earlier, as in... today!
Merry Christmas! :)
So, in today's update, as well as containing a bunch of improvements and fixes we are also introducing two new mechs created in collaboration with community modder Logorouge: Penumbra and Alpha.
One is a glass cannon ninja (or Glassassin if you like) and the other is a roulette mech with completely randomized perks. Both mechs provide a vastly different play experience. Playing as the Penumbra (shown above) can be challenging but very rewarding. With high damage output and a variety of special abilities at its disposal, it's actually possible to feel like a ninja as you use the evasion unit to dash through dangers, and smoke bombs to hide when things get too hectic.
The Alpha (shown below) is the ultimate RNG mech where you could get a level 15 perk at level 1... or vice versa! Both mechs come with completely new weapons such as the Shuriken Shot and the Alpha Slugger.
Other improvements include an extended tutorial, a new condemned boss, extra particle work on weapons (smoke effects, muzzle flashes, bullet death particles), lots of balance work, improvements to perks (plus one entirely new perk), big performance boosts, and more. This build also contains an important fix for certain achievements that was preventing a 100% clear, many apologies for anyone previously frustrated by that problem.
As for AuGMENTED, we're pleased to announce the launch date for that is January 24th. You can watch the trailer for that over on the store page. If you want to be informed when the expansion is available, you can add it to your wishlist so that once it launches you will receive a notification.
We'd encourage anyone considering purchasing Starward Rogue to hold off until our next discount period later this month (*cough cough*). Thanks for your support, and Merry Christmas from the whole Starward Rogue team. :)
Hey, there's a beta version!
New mechs! Free new content always comes alongside our paid expansions, and this one is no exception. Check out the properties for this game under steam, and go under the betas tab and choose beta if you'd like to be a beta tester for our 1.700 version: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=Starward_Rogue:Post-1.5_Release_Notes#BETA_Version_1.700
There's a whole lot of new goodness in there, and that's all for the base game.
If you'd also like to test for the expansion, then please feel free to post here: https://forums.arcengames.com/starward-rogue/sr-expansion-alpha-testing/
Cheers!
Chris
Announcing AuGMENTED, the upcoming expansion for Starward Rogue!
Hello everyone!
Sorry for the lack of updates recently, but we've been super busy working on the upcoming Starward Rogue paid expansion: AuGMENTED! This is going to be a DLC content pack that will add a ton of new stuff to the game. Here's the list of things you can expect:
* A New Golden Floor (a new level design added for this expansion)
* 100+ New Rooms
* 3 New Mechs, The Zephyr, The Paladin, and the Warhog
* 80+ New Items
* 30+ New Unique Enemies
* 6 New Minibosses (sneak peak link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmT3YA3d0iU )
* 8 New Bosses
* 10+ Challenge Rooms (a new style of room)
* 8 New Tile Types
* 4 New Tracks composed by Pablo Vega, and The Overthinkers
In addition, for those with just the base game, there will be 2 new mechs, Penumbra and Roulette Mech Alpha, created in collaboration with community member Logorouge. These designs are based on a couple of Logo's mech mods, which you can find over at the Starward Rogue modding forum
Of course, we're still doing our usual bugfixes and improvements for the base game, which includes this hefty changelog.
We are also currently running a small Alpha test for the expansion, which you can be a part of! It is important to note that this build is a very early version, and is not a smooth ride. If a smooth experience is important to you, we recommend waiting until the beta or full release. However, if you're one of the people who like to try out games in early development, we would love to have you give us feedback!
If you have any questions, the Official Arcen Games Discord Server is a good spot to ask! You can also reply here and we will try to respond back as soon as possible.
The “Difficulty Smoothing” update is now out! For those not aware, the update prior to this one was huge, adding in a ton of new perks and also altering the balance significantly (for reasons I’ll go into below). Unfortunately, the balance was a bit too much on the difficult side, and this update should hopefully address that.
Quick Background
Before I go into the changes for this update, let me first explain why the changes for the previous update were needed. For a good while now, overly strong damage boosting upgrades have had an unhealthy grip on the game, causing the following problems:
1) The ability to stack upgrades to such a degree that the end game would become trivial. There have been many times when we’ve seen players tear through the final super boss of the game in a matter of seconds, and this was not a rare occurrence. It’s fine to hit an occasionally super powerful run that allows the player to do this, but it was happening way too often.
2) Having damage bonus numbers in the region of 50% to 75% for perks would mean that there would be no real choice for the player to make when choosing them. A player is always going to choose 50% damage over 2 extra missiles or a 25 bonus to energy, so coming up with perks to compete with those damage numbers would be very difficult.
3) As a result of the out-of-control damage bonuses, in the event that a player would get unlucky with RNG, and not encounter any, the game would become a very hard slog. Defensive builds could not really be used without the player intentionally wanting to handicap themselves.
4) In order to keep the game challenging so that players weren’t tearing through the end game, we would have to keep upping the HP on late game enemies which would make defensive builds even more worthless. It was a bad cycle.
Our Solution In The Last Update
In order to break free from the stranglehold of the above challenges so that other parts of the game -- like perks -- could flourish, we had to reduce the amount damage bonuses would give you. Then we needed to try and tone down the enemy HP so that there was a bit more of a balance between damage and defense.
We did this, and we knew that this might cause some short-term balance issues. We tried to mitigate this by running a few betas over the course of a couple of months, but unfortunately it seems that wasn’t enough. The build was indeed certainly much too on the difficult side, and overly tanky in particular. For a few folks, we know that was super duper frustrating, so thanks for bearing with us on that and also helping us find the trouble spots.
So What's In This Update?
Now we finally get to the changes for this update. :)
As a result of feedback since the build went out, we’ve managed to adjust a lot in order to get the current build much more nicely balanced. Here are the major changes:
1) Enemy HP has been reduced across the board by 25%. From our play-testing, this seems to have worked well and the game is in a much nicer place now. Far less tanky, and runs are a fair bit shorter too.
2) Damage bonuses have been adjusted back up somewhat. I went a little bit too heavy with the nerfbat on these and so most have been buffed significantly.
3) Health pickup frequency has been increased, and we have also added two new variants of pickup -- so it’s now possible to grab health packs worth 2 and 3 health. These also now appear in the cheap item shop, so you now have more options to spend your credits on.
4) Specific overly-dangerous or tanky enemies have been adjusted. Many enemies on floors 6 and 7 had been pushed up too much in difficulty as a result of trying to compensate for the previously out-of-control damage boosts; so now they needed to be nerfed a fair bit. Rusted Lumiflare in particular!
5) Quite a few rooms have been adjusted to reduce enemy density. A few of these rooms were just too crowded, making them unusual difficulty spikes.
So that’s it, everyone! We hope that this build proves to be a lot nicer in terms of difficulty. Thanks to everyone for their feedback and patience while we were fixing this up. We wouldn’t be able to keep improving the game without your help, so it’s really appreciated. Thanks!
Starward Rogue Update 1.506 "The Perk Overhaul"
Hey everyone, Quinn here.
Since about August, we've been pretty quiet. We've pushed several betas in the past few weeks, and with the help of the beta testers, we've decided that it is now time to push the update to the main branch. The entire team has been working really hard on making this game even better and trying to make it a more enjoyable experience that matches with the vision we have in our minds.
Why The Perks Overhaul? The main focus of this update has been the perks and very late game balance (floors 6 and 7). For a long while, the perks have been a bit lacklustre, and so with help and ideas from the community (a huge thank you to everyone who gave us feedback) this part of the game has now been overhauled.
In terms of the late game balance, the game is now going to be harder than it was before. Previously, damage ups were way too strong, so by the time you got to floors 6 and 7 you would probably be super overpowered.
This balance has been changed significantly, so no more murdering enemies before they can respond. Enemies can now take a good bit of damage, without feeling too bullet spongy, and get off their patterns. Basically, those evil Rusted Lumiflares, which are the embodiment of the bullet hell side of the game, can actually get their pattern off before they die. Damage perks have certainly been hit by the nerfbat, but not so hard that they aren't still a good choice. In fact, they are now a hard choice to make. Do I want the extra damage or do I want some other cool perk?
Speaking of cool perks, we've added a ton of those! We tried to come up with a bunch of interesting ideas, then put the interesting ideas together and let you choose only one. We're mean like that. ;) Get ready for perks such as Savings Interest, An Eye For an Eye, Bloody Rage, Big Game Hunter, and many more.
Changes To Higher Floors
Despite loving to murder... er, I mean help players, we did make some really nice changes to make the game more fair. No more lower level enemies doing more damage on later floors for no reason! We also made the floors shorter, since we don't want to make Running Mech Simulator 2017 (tm). That also helps with the attrition that is now going on.
But Wait! We're Fair!
Wait a minute! You just said you were making the game more fair! Well, I also said we are mean. Now, most things do 2 points of damage, but you can only heal for one point. This means that you're less likely to steamroll your way to the end of the game leaving behind piles of health pickups, and much more likely to have to fight your way there, and actually pay attention to the pretty shapes the bullets make.
Side Effects Lead To Other Cool Things The attrition does have a plus side though! The consumables in the game are REALLY nice. It used to be "Oh, I don't need consumables, I can steamroll my way through the floor", now it is "Ooh, this consumable will save my life more than likely on this floor. If not, I'm almost certainly going to be using it on the next. Unless you're Misery. Then you just ignore logic and win regardless.
Energy weapons are also more valuable now, since every enemy doesn't drop dead in a matter of nanoseconds, so the damage you deal actually, you know, matters. So the more energy you have, the more damage you can do, which means the faster you can kill things, so you take less damage. Its a great cycle!
Now, About Those New Items... You remember the XP bubble things right? There are more types of them, that give more XP, so you'll enjoy those.
There are some new modules now too. Personally, I like the one that causes a giant ring of ice around you. It helps increase the amount of damage you do to most enemies and limits the danger of things like bulldogs. NB. Bulldogs and chargers are still going to mess you up even with this module. You still have to shoot them and play smart.
And New Enemies... We've also added some new enemies! There are little popcorn enemies, that aren't really dangerous unless there are a lot of them, then there are defensive enemies, which block your shots (But they're rare, so you're relatively safe), and then there are maze types, which work well in complicated corridors.
Horrible news time: Misery got his hands on the dev tools. He made a super Blaze Cannon called an Inferno Cannon. In his words: "You'll die to these. A lot. You thought Blaze Cannons were bad? Haha. They're nothing compared to these nightmares. Fortunately for you, they only appear on later floors and they're somewhat rare. Unfortunately for you, it only takes one of these to make a room extremely dangerous in a way that no other enemy can. Like Blaze Cannons these guys fire sparking missiles that go through walls. It's what those missiles DO that makes them so very deadly." In conclusion, run. Run fast and far to escape the Inferno Cannons.
New Boss!? He may have, uh, also gotten his hands on the tools for creating a new boss. So you might notice that there is a new boss that is going to make your life suck. That's all his fault.
This has been a pretty huge update, there have been a ton of improvements, changes, bugfixes, and additions, most of which we probably can't even remember -- it's a good job we have a changelog then! Thanks everyone! We hope you enjoy the new build. :) Relevant release notes are versions 1.502 to 1.506 if you haven't been playing the beta.
New beta build for you! To get this one, you'll need to right-click the game in Steam and hit Properties, then go to Betas and opt into the beta for this game. Right now the guys are basically looking for feedback, because this is a huge number of changes!
There's just an incredible, incredible amount of stuff in there. The biggest single group of changes is in the perk overhaul, though; that's a really exciting one.
Expansion Kickstarter?
Yep! Details on this are scarce right now, but basically the volunteers behind all these awesome free updates over the last year are putting together a paid expansion pack with even more new features. We'll have more on that coming up, and a link to the kickstarter and all that when it's going live, of course. For now I just wanted to mention that that's a thing on the horizon!
It's completely separate from anything Keith and I are doing on the AI War 2 kickstarter, as an aside. So no worries about negative overlap there in either direction.
Hey! Didn't think we forgot about Starward Rogue, did you? There's been a ton of stuff going on with it, though we've not had a release since May.
I'm going to break this post into two parts: an "abstract," if you will, that is briefer and up here at the top. And then an incredibly-long section below with all the details. So when you see the length of this thing, feel free to stop reading after the abstract. Here we go!
Abstract
The TLDR is that this game is being included in the August Humble Monthly, and as a part of that they sponsored some awesome new content that is available for everybody -- if you already have the game, you're getting this content for free, too.
BUT we also have a bunch of other awesome updates that go along with this that are unrelated to Humble, but are just things-that-have-been-in-progress-since-May. The difference in the feel of the game, to me, is nothing short of incredible. And I feel like I can take this moment to brag a bit, since I've had nothing to do with the specific content, given I've been busy with In Case of Emergency, Release Raptor for my own work.
The end boss, Terminus, is now incredibly more epic, which is very exciting. Balance work has been done all over the place, and the ending areas of the game are a lot harder. There are dozens of new things of various sorts: enemies, items, weapons, etc, etc.
Both the consumable shops and the sacrifice shops have gotten huge updates to be more useful and filled with more goodies. There's a new mech, bringing the total from 6 to 7.
There are also now teleporters that let you easily backtrack to key points that you've visited in the past on the current floor. Saves a ton of time and streamlines exploration. And lots, lots more.
Humble Monthly
What's this new sponsored content? Glad you asked!
The Humble Mech
Description: Gets a 10% discount at all stores, and 20 credits starting spending money. Armed with the Contrishooter, a secondary weapon that is powered by your own generosity, and a missile launcher that converts enemies into credits on kill.
A bit of a game changing mechanic on this mech, due to it's secondary weapon that uses credits instead of energy.
Note from Chris: This is my own favorite mech now, I think. It's definitely not overpowered, but it fits my playstyle really well. I tend to be pretty frugal in the game, and having extra credits here actually encourages me to spend a bit more.
But even more than that, my frugality is rewarded a bit in that I can unleash a ton of hurt on bosses with the Contrishooter. All of the existing mechs (there are 6 until now) are great and each fit a specific playstyle, but this is the first one that truly supports my own slightly-speedrunny-very-little-shopping playstyle.
"The Humbled": New Boss
This is a new multi phase boss that uses two sets of orbiting minions as its defense.
If you don't mind spoilers, here's a video of the Hard mode version of the Humble-themed boss. The normal mode version is not so intense.
Bear in mind that this takes extra time in that video because Misery was playing with no upgrades whatsoever to his mech, so the boss feels extra tanky thanks to that. In actual gameplay where you've collected items and leveled up and whatnot it dies at a better rate.
Consumable Shop Overhaul
The consumable shop has always been something that most players wouldn't normally have thought worthy of using a keycard on, so we decided to put some extra love here; the shop has been overhauled, including changes to its structure as well as the addition of a lot of new content.
Firstly, there are two variants of this shop. The normal shop which the player will encounter on most of their runs, which features a few new Humble-themed items. Then, there is also a new special Humble Shop which appears more rarely, but has 7 slots for items -- instead of 3.
Humble-Themed Items
Here is a list of the Humble specific content that has been added as part of the Consumable shop overhaul.
Small/Medium/Large Humble Bundles: These items allow the player to spawn a random selection of goodies. The bigger the bundle, the more cool stuff that can appear.
Alternate Deality: This is an item that allows you to reroll the current shop selection.
Energy Drink: This item will refill the players energy.
Repair Putty: This item will heal the player's hull.
CreditToEnergy: This allows the player to convert their credits to energy.
CreditToMissile: This allows the player to convert their credits to missiles.
EnergyToMissile: This allows the player to convert their energy to missiles.
Humble Voucher: This is a sacrifice item which gives the player a 10% discount at shops, which can stack with the Humble Mech discount.
Other Updates!
These things don't have anything to do with Humble, but they are a part of the general 1.5 update of the game, so you'll find these brand-new things waiting for you as you launch the game, too. :)
Backtracking Teleporter Pads
A long desired feature. Backtracking teleporters! These allow for much faster movement around the floors in order to making backtracking much easier. You'll see these in the corner of rooms. They work rather like the Warp Whistle did in Zelda 1, except faster.
Sacrifice Shop Overhaul
The sacrifice shop has had 13 new items added: Coupon Cutter, A Phasing Grace, Dead Eye Module, Explodifier, Grin And Bear It, Lorentz Factor, Magic Missile Box, Nanite Hull, Overcritical, Photoelectric, Skeleton Keycard, Scourge Spread, and the Blood Avenger. These items were created with help from the community.
This really makes a big difference, because on long runs the sacrifice shops could be getting empty on the lower floors.
Misery's Enemy and Room Balance Overhaul
Numerous adjustments have been made to the enemies, especially those late game. Floors 6 and 7 are a lot tougher now. As well as just adjustments, there are also new enemies to fight including Fragment, Diffusion, and many other new variants of existing enemies. Watch out for those Blue Facerippers!
New Weapons
A pack of 9 new main, energy, and missile launchers has been added: Plasma Shotgun, Warhog's Shotgun, Solar Flaregun, Stomper, Burstomatic, Interceptor Crossbow, Big Homing Missile Launcher, Homing Multi Mini Missile Launcher, and the Triple Squared Missile Launcher. Created in collaboration with community member Goldenwolf! Additionally, Spread Shot now added for real – it wasn't seeding in the previous patch.
New Boss and Miniboss stuff
Misery has added a new boss called Sunder, as well as completely overhauling Terminus (the super-final boss). It's now a crazy and epic fight worthy of being called the true final boss. New miniboss Loco has been added courtesy of Ptarth, plus a new Reaper variant, and a few improvements to the existing ones.
Improved Items
A few items have received some attention such as the Cryofreeze, Incineration, and the Sheltering Modules. Improvements for Limiter Removal, Phase Module, and many more.
Mech Selection
Now it's possible at add new mechs to the game without them overwriting the existing mechs. Now you can get a page scroll so that it's possible to add as many mechs as desired. Very useful for modders.
Whew!
And that's all that we can remember, at least. ;) The release notes are freaking long, and they don't include anything from the Humble section.
This update is almost entirely brought to you by our awesome volunteers Misery, ptarth, Pepisolo, and Cinth. They had some help from other community members in some cases, and Blue from our staff provided the art and Keith provided some coding, but they did all the heavy lifting. I'm super impressed with their work.
Been a while, hasn't it? Our last update to the game was just over a month ago. Well, even the release notes don't remotely do this one justice!
Basically there was previously a problem with the balance progression throughout the game if you were past a certain skill level in particular. And there were some rooms that would give you situations where you might take unavoidable hits. And there were some enemies that were out of whack, and some weapons for you. And most of the consumable items were underwhelming.
Well... wowza, what a ton of changes to tune this one up for you. The math for the progression of the game has been completely reworked, along with a lot of math in a lot of other places. 96 of the room templates have had tweaks to them, and the rest have had a hard squinting-at. The final bosses are going to kick you in the teeth now (as they should), rather than you commonly having an OP build that would let you blaze through them quickly. The latter still CAN happen, which is part of the fun of this genre, but now it's not remotely (vaguely, slightly) as frequent as it was before.
Oh! Hey, yeah, there's also... seven, I think?... new weapons for you. Four new familiars, too. Bunches of new sound effects and some new particle effects. A new enemy, the Zombot.
Good grief! And yes, of course, the Freaking Volunteers (whom this release is courtesy of) are still working on more. If you run into any balance issues or have other feedback (good as well as bad!), I'm sure they'd love to hear from you on our forums, the steam forums, our bugtracker... you know where to find us.
New build for you! Included are two new consumable items: Wormhole Journey and Anomaly Detector. There is also a loooooong list of consumables that have been tweaked and tuned. A number of bugs have been fixed relating to homing weapons and familiars, and there are some new sound effects as well.
New one! This continues the recent trend of refinement-focused releases. It updates/adds a number of sound effects, it adds several enemy variants, it refines a number of player weapons, and fixes a number of bugs. It also adds yet more modding xml commands, and a new main-slot weapon: the Smart Gun.
