Hello everyone, it's time for the monthly Dev-Blog!

Hiring Pixel-Artist

Looking at the amount of workload left on the artside, I'm looking for yet another pixel-art.
There is no need to have animation skill, I'm only looking for icon and environement props

If you are interested and think you can fit the game art-style, please send an email to roguegenesia@gmail.com.

Progress of Update 0.9

As already announced, Update 0.9 is delayed by a few weeks than I originally wanted.
This set the Update to arround 15 to 22 August.
Update may be pushed again if I see there is a need to, but an announcement will be made for that.

Let's see what been changed since last devlog!

Tooltips & Keywords

This may be the biggest QoL improvement on this update.
Many keyword are now [u]underlined[/u], and by hovering the mouse over, you'll have a short tooltip.

This also work for card and artifact name so you can directly preview them.

You can also directly hover stats in card's description to know you current value, what they do, and what will be the future value.

Stats menu

Stats also got a lot of improvement since last dev-log,
It had an improvement to lissibility over,
It also now display bonus from soul-shop as well as the avatar innate stats
Did I mention you can also hover the card name to directly check the card?

New card design

As some may have noticed in the previous screens, Card got an update to their design.
It get improved visual that should feel a bit more polished that the old flat design.
The new design also leave more space for description and allow the addition of tags list at the bottom of the card.
This also come with a screen selection redesign
While also minor, Weapon card description got a small refactoring that allow for weapon to display any stats they want without having to hardcode them

New endscreen

End screen also got a major improvement.
The new endscreen has a small animation, but more importantly it display a breakdown of your Soulcoin and Talent mastery gain!
[img]https://i.imgur.com/MiyfoYJ.png/img]

Bestiary

Bestiary also got a small update.
Completing a monster entry in the bestiary will increase the experience dropped by the monster
You can also check the list of all elite modifier in the game and their effects

Pick-up list

Similarly to the elite modifier list, there is a list of pick-up to understand what are their effects

Avatar skin

Major feature added into the game, unlockable skins.
As of now, it's very limited as I prefer to focus the workforce on new avatar than making skin for old avatar.
However, this system will be useful for modder to add proper skin to avatars than hacking them in (sorry EasyAvatar)

New Avatars

Summoner

Major new avatar, that play arround a entire custom mechanic.
Summoner own custom "summon weapon" that summon monster to fight for him.
There monster have their own health, defence, and damage.
Their stats usualy scale with the player.

The animation and pixel version of the summoner are not finished so I only have the concept I've made a few week ago

Duelist

Duelist is a damage oriented avatar, with very low health.
Her special ability is "Death Door"
When reaching 0 Health, she enter a Death door state where she become unkilalble for 1 sec and disable health regen for 3 seconds

Talent changes

During this month, not much was done on the talents. The biggest change is that talents are now set per avatars.
This change will allow for introducing avatar-specialized talents in the future.
There are also some notifications when an empty slot is left in your avatar's talents. The notification goes away when you open and close the talent men

Music

During this month, I've been fortunate enough to find not one, but two composers to work on the game's soundtrack.
Originally, I had planned to hire just one composer, but considering the amount of work needed to create the entire soundtrack, having two composers on board seemed like a great decision.
Here is a few tracks that been completed so far, with many more on the way!

Other minor changes

• 12 New artifacts
• 9 New soulcards
• Encyclopedia can now be viewed at anytime during a run.
• Enemy spawn rate scaling overtime rebalance
• Artifact price in shop rebalance
• New gunslinger stat
• New C-rank challenges
• New C-rank challenges
• Likely others things I forgot about because I have a bad memory
  

Weapon Cap

I understand that some of you may prefer the uncapped weapon limit in Rogue: Genesia, so before expressing any concerns, please be aware that there is a slider in the options that allows you to bypass the weapon cap (or set a custom cap from 1 to 10).

A very recent major change that came into the game was setting a weapon cap depending on the avatar you use, with the cap being between 4 and 10 weapons.

The main drive behind this change is performance. There is no way, even with the best optimization in the world, that a computer can handle 25 weapons shooting every frame with 25 projectiles. While it doesn't completely solve the issues, it greatly reduces them. Another reason behind this change is that having a lot of weapons is a noob-trap.

The change was first requested by Elentor (person working on optimizing the game) after seeing someone play the game and noticed they just picked every weapon they could without trying to banish them.
After a bit of discussion with other players, I noticed that banishing weapons was a common strategy used by the best players.
One simple reason for that is that taking 20 weapons instead of 4 won't significantly increase your damage capabilities, but you lose more than 100 card levels that could have been spent on other passive cards that would greatly benefit you.

Adding a weapon cap should prevent most players from falling into this trap and overall improve their performances.

Run Length Debate

As I continue to add more difficulty tiers to the game, the length of runs will continue to increase. This was part of my initial vision and how I designed the game.
As you get farther into the game, you reach hours-long runs. That's why I quickly developed a Save and Load system for the run, to allow for these long runs to happen without asking the player to complete them in a single sitting.

However, I've seen a few players complain about the length of the runs. Some players really love and embrace this long run design, while others despise it and would prefer much shorter runs.

In the end, the best solution that I can think of is to create 2 sub-gamemodes for Rog's mode. One would be the "Campaign" mode, which will continue to involve longer runs, and the other would be "Quick-Play" mode, which will aim to be a shorter experience (1 hour of real-time at most).
There are a few things I'm thinking of to allow quick play. First, every zone except the last would have half the number of stages they normally do (8 instead of 16). There would also be an increase in non-combat stages, and the removal of altars on boss fights to directly start the boss fight.

The subject is still open to discussion, so you are welcome to share your thoughts on that.

However, if it's decided to implement this change, the "Campaign"/"Quick-Play" mode wouldn't rather be pushed to the 0.10 update due to time constraints. I don't want to delay the 0.9 update any further.

Left to Be Done

4th Zone Boss

This is my next task, and also the one I'm more worried about.
I have a rough idea of the boss fight, but I don't know if it'll work visually or mechanically.
I'll need to test a lot of things before reaching something I like, and I may even scrap a lot of work on this boss. So, I remain quite hesitant and unsure about the way I want to handle it so far.

C-rank Survivors

Once the next boss is completed and functional, I'll focus my work on creating C-rank survivors. That should leave about 7/12 days of player testing to achieve a good balance.
The C-rank survivors mode will be split into 4 sections of 10 minutes (instead of the usual 15 minutes), with a boss encounter every 10 minutes.

Finishing Volcano Enemies

While mostly finished, there are a few abilities I still need to implement (such as golem and slime splitting), as well as a monster missing animations and designs.

Finishing Biomes Visuals

The volcano and snow forest zones are still quite rough in terms of visuals. I would like to spend some time improving them.

New Cards

The current card pool is too light for C-rank, especially with the recent changes on card requirements. I'm thinking of adding more cards to some build types that lack variety.
There is likely a need for around 30 additional soul-cards.

Snow Enemy Variant

I would like the snow biome to have its own enemy variant, but due to unexpected events, there have been more delays than I wished for on the enemy animations.
This means snow enemy variants are likely going to be pushed back to the next update, as I don't want them to delay the current update since it's a non-essential change.

[ 2023-08-02 10:42:17 CET ] [Original Post]