Hello everyone, time for the monthly dev blog! To start this month's dev blog, I have an important news to share:

Rogue: Genesia is no longer published by iolaCorp

After months of dedicated effort, I have successfully ended my partnership with iolaCorp. This is effective as of 1st of July.

Isn't that a bad thing?

Sadly, iolaCorp failed me as a publisher. At first, I was fine with the publishing deal, especially as I owned a share of the company. However, disagreements appeared over time, notably in the sharing of expenses. I ended up doing most of the work that a publisher is supposed to fulfill: marketing, finding workforce, translation, community management. While continuing to share 50% of the revenue of the game. Earlier this year, around March, I finally consulted with them to reach a friendly agreement with iolaCorp so I can retrieve the full rights of Rogue: Genesia. I am no longer part of iolaCorp, and we'll be walking our own way.

What does it mean for the game?

Not that much, the plan I have for the game won't change. The main change is that I'll be able to spend more of the revenue on the development of the game. That also means that, if the 1.0 release of the game goes well enough, I will be able to hire someone to continue working on the game beyond that, but it's still too soon to make any concrete plans for that. Finally, that also means I can properly invest money in marketing, reaching a bigger audience. Now, let's get to the work done this month

Month progress

Contrary to previous dev-blogs, there is not that much flashy stuff to show. There are two reasons for that: First, I was busy with the whole publisher stuff, and it took a bit of time off development. Secondly, since we are getting closer to the release of the 0.10, I'm actually more focused on polishing, bug fixes, and finishing all the content I need for the release rather than doing big changes or improvements. So it mostly consists of hundreds of small changes/improvements that don't really fit well in a dev-blog. There is still a few cool stuff to show, but it won't be as big as usual or as new as usual.

Music

New music also got added in the game. I've also started to take a look around to make and sell the OST on Steam. It'll likely come a few weeks after 0.10 releases. This is the fight theme during the Manor stage: [previewyoutube=ob8u4P2KMHo;full][/previewyoutube] And the elite theme inside the Crystal Depth: [previewyoutube=96wBadkccFY;full][/previewyoutube]

Challenge

This month I've worked on adding new challenges. There are still a few challenges missing to feel complete. Here are a few:

Equipment loadout

A major QoL improvement done this month is the addition of equipment loadouts. You can at any moment either create a new loadout or copy an existing one. When making it, I had the choice between two ways of doing loadouts. The first was to make a classic loadout system, where you put your equipment in your inventory and then save the loadout so you can load it at any time. The second way, which is how it actually works: Was to start the player with a default empty loadout, and that any equipped item is considered equipped in the loadout, so every time you swap an item, it is effective on this loadout. This is more of an automatic loadout, where the first version would require a bit more manual action from the player (saving/loading loadout). Items can also be equipped in multiple loadouts. There is no limit to the number of loadouts you can have, and you can name them however you want.

Unique Equipment

My current focus as of now is adding a variety of unique items that will complement the procedural ones. Unique items can only be found when fulfilling certain conditions (for now, they only drop in certain challenges) and having Unique modifiers. Here are a few of the already made unique equipment:






There is quite a lot left to make, and the icons take a huge amount of time, so expect a few placeholders for the 0.10 release.

Balance change

It's a minor change overall, but the base move-speed of many enemies got reduced a lot, especially for the faster ones at higher ranks. Along with the reduction to the speed, I've changed how corruption increases the move-speed of enemies, now having a multiplicative scaling based on OoM instead of linear (so every X10 corruption, the enemies get x1.5 times faster, instead of gaining +50% move-speed). Another change is that attack speed now belongs to the wind tag instead of the fire tag. This also changes how the Fire stone (and upgrade) and wind stone (and upgrade) affect stats. Moving the attack speed of Fire stone to the wind stone, and adding a piercing scaling to the Fire stone.

0.10 release date

I know that last month, I targeted July as the release date, but it's clear that the update won't be ready by then. The new release target is August 7, but it'll still be hard to meet and may be pushed back by a few day. I'm currently focused on finishing the update, doing the missing sprites, and those damn animations are still delaying the whole update (sorry). There are also a few bugs I have difficulty fixing (very hard to reproduce). While they are not game-breaking, I would prefer to fix them before the release of the update.