New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=Starward_Rogue:Post-1.5_Release_Notes#Version_2.601_.28XInput_Fix.29 This one fixes a memory leak that was part of XInput.

[ 2022-03-03 23:52:46 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hello there. Today we have a new update you probably didn't expect. This is a big one, so there's a little something for everyone in it and we hope you enjoy it. The list of changes is pretty long, but here is a quick summary: * 50 new rooms for the AuGMENTED expansion. * 4 new weapons: The Dragon Cannon ATR, Salvo Minigun, Spinblade Cannon and Horizon Sniper Rifle. * New missile launcher: The Knowledge Hound Launcher. * 2 new modules: The Assassin and Rocketeer Modules. * 3 new powerups: Toxic Ammo, Contaminated Ammo and Tampered Regulator. * 6 new consumable drones: Missile, Casket, LaserTwin, Overload, Riot and Biotech Drones. * 6 new Ancestor Guardian consumables: Sunstone, Bloodstone, Sapphire, Diamond, Emerald and Amethyst Ancestor Guardians. These will allow you to channel the Ancestors power for a short duration, giving you an elemental breath attack and various special effects, depending on the Ancestor. * 15 new communications from Rodney in the mech selection screen, based on victories. * Less desirable items and perks have been tweaked to make them very much worth picking up. * Weapon stats have been given an accuracy pass to eliminate inconsistencies. Frequency of primary and secondary weapons have been changed so they are more evenly distributed. * Firerate and energy cost of the boss-themed weapons have been completely re-balanced. * Spawning rules of bosses have been tweaked for both the base game and Augmented expansion to allow bosses exclusive to mid floors to appear more often. * Statistics menu has been cleaned up and reorganized by tags to make it easier to look through. * Dozens of item descriptions have been extended and clarified. * Duration of the shot cancelling effect when using a teleporter has been greatly reduced to avoid accidentally wasting missiles and energy. * Caltrops tiles now have improved visibility and sharpness. * Countless rooms tweaked. * Tons of other refinements and bugfixes. * New music track by Pablo Vega! You can find the full changelog here.

One final little bonus, is the Galactic Arena test chamber. This isn't officially supported as a proper feature, but we wanted to include it in the base game for people to try out. It is a wave survival mode mini-game which can be a fun change of pace from doing regular runs. To access it from the main menu, simply click Mods, select the Galactic_Arena test chamber and buckle up! (Par time: 5mins) Many thanks everybody for your support and have fun. :)

[ 2021-11-24 18:01:25 CET ] [ Original post ]

Chris here! By any sane metric I can think of, AI War 2 shouldn't exist. And yet it's more than I ever imagined it could be. When we first set out to make this game three years ago, it was far less ambitious. Even that was going to be really hard. Somehow, in the process of falling down the stairs over and over again during this period, we wound up with a game that seems to be superior to the original. This game shouldn't exist, but it does, and I'm both proud and stunned.

The Secret? Community

The intro to this post runs the risk of sounding like I'm tooting my own horn, but it's not actually about me. I'm not capable of making -- even just designing -- this game on my own. I don't think anyone is, really. The fact that this game exists isn't a testament to me having some brilliant insight or a singular vision that I doggedly pursued. The reviews of the game are lovely, but give me entirely too much personal credit. The state of this game is thanks to dozens of people critically thinking about this game -- what this one and the original means to them and to others -- and then a process of relentless, continuous, arduous iteration and improvement.

MVP Award: BadgerBadger

This section is long, and in some ways tangential, but if you read it you'll understand why I've put it here so prominently. You have this guy to thank as much as me or Keith for this game existing. Badger has been involved since the kickstarter, with questions and comments and key insights. For a lot of the first year, he was responsible for something like 80% of the bug reports and feature ideas on our idea tracker. When a lot of other people were just bouncing off the game and waiting around for Keith LaMothe and I to figure things out on our own -- understandable, really -- Badger was there providing really key insight and ideas. But that was barely the start for him. After a while I was essentially like "so, do you just want source code access, given how much you're doing here?" Because he had started doing some mods -- nanocaust and macrophage, at the time, IIRC -- and it was clear he would be less hand-tied if he had more access. What happened next was essentially us getting a developer -- volunteer, no less -- who contributed as much to the design of the game as I did, in my opinion. Not only did he single-handedly conceive of and implement the nanocaust and macrophage, but he also did the dark spire and marauder impelementations, among many, many other things. Some of the most brilliant and devious things that the AI has in this game compared to the first one? Badger. Some of your favorite UI detail screens, like metal flows? Badger. Not to mention all the bugfixes, balance tweaks, and... just oodles more. This game wouldn't exist in anything like the state it does now without Badger. Any credit for my "singular vision" on the game is doing him a major disservice, but he's a quiet sort of guy when it comes to taking credit, so I wanted to take this chance to call him out in particular.

Growing Volunteer Developer Corps

So, Badger is not remotely the only person I need to call out as being absolutely indispensable. RocketAssistedPuffin has also been involved heavily for the last year plus, and has taken over huge numbers of things that I never would have had time for. After I implemented the new tech system one way, he's the one who figured out how to make it substantially more balanced. Most of the voluminous "balance change" sections on the release notes are from him working with other players or just reasoning things out himself. Puffin has also had a ton of ideas on how to make things better in all sorts of sections of the game, and there was a period of about three months late last year where he and Badger were basically doing ALL the development on the game and I just pushed out releases of what they were doing. I was going through a really painful divorce and had a ton of anxiety and couldn't face work, and these two kept things alive and improving. But it never stopped there. Those new tutorials you like? Puffin. I wrote the bulk of the "How To Play" in-game wiki sections, but the most basic and understandable ones for new players were... again, Puffin. I'm excellent at writing encyclopedic entries that fill you in on huge numbers of details, but he's the one who distilled "what's the most central stuff you need to know, as briefly as possible" so that people can actually get into the game in any reasonable timeframe. Compare his work here to the tutorials I did in the original game, and it's night and day. And I'm still selling Puffin short, frankly, because he's done so many things over such a long period that I can't remember it all now. More recently, we've had folks like WeaponMaster and Asteroid joining in and adding lots of bugfixes and quality of life improvements that I never would have had the time to do myself. Things like hovering over galaxy map links to see information on them were Asteroid. Endless tricky bugfixes were WeaponMaster. I'm selling them both short, but the release notes are filled with things that they either implemented or suggested or both. And it doesn't stop there. Quinn stepped in an made a bunch of additions. Keith laid the original groundwork for the entire game simulation and multithreading (he was the main programmer and designer for the first year and a half, and actually on staff during that time). And there were so, so many others. And more each month!

Volunteers Beat Modders, I Think

I'm pretty free with the source code access, because I'd rather have a consolidated community of people helping rather than a bunch of mods that you have to hunt down and find. So a lot of the folks that have turned into volunteers are what would have been modders on most other games. They would have made their own thing that you had to install and then wonder about the cross-compatibility of. This game does have a ton of moddability, and for anyone who wants to "just" be a modder, that's absolutely fine with me. But for a lot of the mods that are getting the most love, I'm happy to share source code access with those folks so that they're in no way hobbled, and so that their work can go out as additional content that every player can find via in-game options without having to hunt through Steam Workshop or whatever else. It's an unorthodox approach, but a lot more team-oriented and lets us do quality control on each others' stuff, "mods" included, which is a big win. If someone wants to steal the source code for this game, they can just decompile it like any other game for the most part. I'd rather put my trust in people and see things flourish rather than retain a stranglehold out of fear or pride.

What Did I Actually Do, Then?

All of this help from others let me focus on some of the really tricky architectural and design problems, which led to things like us even being able to HAVE a simulation of this size, and to have it perform as smoothly as it does. I got to build lots of mechanics that other people then actually turned into specific units. It also gave me time to focus on some really nagging problems that just made the early versions of the game... unpleasant. If I hadn't had the time to think and talk to people about all those things, we never would have seen all the game evolve this way; I would have been mired in content development and other items just to get the basics out for the game. The original design for this was something that Keith and I put together as a pair, but it only worked out so well. It was a good foundation, but needed... a lot of help. We both pushed that forward a lot, until the money situation got to the point where he (and all the other staff, eventually) had to step away, and I carried on "alone" (but with all those volunteers). There came a couple of major turning points where I was reflecting on why I was so unhappy with this game as it existed, and listening to the various gripes that playtesters had, and then I was able to spend a month or three implementing something drastically new. Fleets are the most notable of those, and they were initially met with a lot of mixed feelings and distaste because only part of my idea was there on the first public launch of those. Only in the last month or so has that feature completely come into its own, and that also had a lot to do with continuous feedback from people in early access telling me what they needed and what they did and didn't like. We also had a number of points during development where we just couldn't escape certain performance problems, because there were suddenly battles that were an order of magnitude larger than the first game (which was itself the largest strategy game simulation of individual units that I'm aware of on the market until this sequel). So I got to focus on a whole bunch of crazy improvements and data structure inventions and even GPU shader tricks in order to make all this stuff work. Without the rest of the community helping, there's no way I could have had time to work on all that sort of thing, even in three years of development. A game of this scope shouldn't run this well -- it shouldn't be possible -- but it is because I was given the gift of time by so many others.

A Decade In The Making

It has been 10 years to the day since the first AI War came to Steam, and it's been 3 years of developing this sequel. We didn't do any work on any AI War games from late 2014 through late 2016, but the rest of that time has been spent at least partly working on the original game or this sequel. From version 5.0 of the original game through version 8.0, Keith was pretty much the sole developer on that while I focused on other things. He built out a ton of creative and clever things that made a return in this game, and also pushed the concept of what the AI could be -- adding in some traditional decision-tree style logic in places in addition to the more decentralized-style AI that I had come up with back in 2009. That one that originally made waves on slashdot and reddit and hackernews and so on. I've worked as the producer and design lead on this sequel, among my many other roles, and so the fact that there seems to be a "singular vision" is hopefully a sign that I did a good job in that role. But the degree to which this is a product of dozens of people's work, over an extremely long period of time, really can't be understated. That's what I meant all the way back at the start. This sort of thing shouldn't have happened. It's just so... unlikely. A ton of people came together over a decade and helped make something unlike anything else on the market. That's before even getting into other major (former) staff contributors like Daniette "Blue" Shinkle doing the vast majority of the art and coming up with the way-prettier style of ship that evolved AFTER the kickstarter, the awesome score by Pablo Vega, and 25 voice actors who did a fantastic job as various humans and the AI. And good grief, I'd be remiss not to mention Erik and Craig and all the other folks at Indie Bros, who helped manage so many aspects of this game, as well as often doing work like helping clean up voice lines, etc.

A Few Common Questions

If you're interested in what is coming in the very short term, there's a post for that. Similar if you want to know what the plan is for multiplayer. For kickstarter backers (or anyone else who is curious), there's an FAQ as well as roadmap of stuff for the next few quarters relating to kickstarter stretch goals. And I just have to once-again plug this awesome After Action Report by zeusalmighty.

My Deepest Thanks

I never wanted to make this game, because I didn't think I could. The original AI War seemed to be the high water mark of my career, and I spent a lot of time trying to make peace with that. But when the market shifted in 2015 and 2016 and finances started getting tight, it became clear that returning to the game that started it all was what made the most sense. Thanks to all of the kickstarter backers for believing that we even COULD build this game. Keith and I felt like we could do something that would make you happy, but probably not something that would top the original. It took two extra years of development and an enormous village of people to make THAT a reality. So thanks to everyone for their patience and support during that time. I also want to say a big thanks to everyone for their understanding during my divorce, which happened shortly after entering Early Access for this game. That made everything so much harder, and took me out of commission for a full three months or so where I just couldn't work much. I had to learn how to be me again, and come to terms with being a dad with shared custody rather than a full-time father, and all of that was incredibly hard. But the good news is that, as has happened with this game itself, a lot of things in my personal life have turned out unexpectedly, improbably well in the last year. After deciding to date again (after 18 years off the market, wow), I wound up meeting the woman who is now my fiance surprisingly quickly (all things considered). Kara and her daughter have made my entire world so much richer than I realized it could be, and my son finally has the sister he's wanted for so much of his life. I feel incredibly fortunate, and a lot of my ability to get back to work and not crumble under the weight of anxiety and expectations for this game were thanks to Kara's support and presence. The reality of her life as a doctor and surgeon also helps to kind of put my own work into perspective, sometimes, in the best way. However this turns out financially, and despite my anxieties about my future as a game developer, I'm incredibly proud of what we've all created together, and I feel surrounded by all the right people both at work and outside of work. This has been the hardest three year period of my life, but the end result has all been worth it. Thanks to everyone, and I hope you enjoy the game -- both what it is now, and what's to come. Very Best, Chris

[ 2019-10-22 20:15:59 CET ] [ Original post ]

It's been quite a saga, if you've followed along all this time. All that extra time paid off! At this point we have what fans have nearly-universally hailed as a worthy successor to the original classic. We still have plenty more to do prior to 1.0 in Q2 of 2019, but the game is ready to play now and we hope you'll come enjoy it and give us further feedback. Pick up the game now for 10% off!

New To AI War?

The original AI War is widely considered one of the top strategy games of all time, with a central mechanic that no other title has replicated. Humanity has already lost the war, and now you command the last remnants in a desperate campaign to take back the galaxy. More than most strategy games, your actions have consequences: taking every minor outpost you see is a surefire way to alert the enemy and spell your own doom. Strike smart, capture new technology, and bring down a foe that overmatches you in every way.

What's New In 2?

The sequel improves the UI, the graphics, the audio, and many of the core mechanics. It's an across-the-board upgrade. But even more than that, it brings in new friends and foes alike -- large factions are now possible, with their own sophisticated AI, economies, and rules. Marauders are now able to conquer territory, and build up their own bases if left un-checked. The nanocaust feeds on the strength of those around it, while the macrophage happily grows in the background, sending out spores... Enjoy the classic human vs AI cage match, or expand to a much wider living galaxy.

25% off Loyalty Coupon!

If you own the original AI War, or The Last Federation, or Bionic Dues -- check your inventory on Steam! You may need to restart it, or log out and back in. Inside, you'll find a coupon for 25% off on top of the launch 10% discount. Both are only valid this week, so hopefully this isn't sitting in your inbox too long!

[ 2018-10-18 00:03:55 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hey everybody In celebration of Arcen launching AI War 2 into Early Access today, we're also pushing the next update of Starward Rogue: The Unlock Overhaul! There are also huge discounts on all Arcen's games for the first week of AI War 2's launch.
This is a free content update that adds 87 new items to the game: 62 new unlockable items for the base game, a further 16 unlockable items for the AuGMENTED expansion, and 9 new items going straight into the base game. The unlockable items are awarded after completing achievements. For any already completed achievements, the rewards will automatically be unlocked.
Back when Starward Rogue launched around 2 and a half years ago we weren't able to get everything into the game that we originally wanted. One of those things was reward unlocks. But with this update, that has now changed! Now for nearly every achievement in the game you will unlock an item reward upon completing it. The only two achievements that don't have unlockable items are Unlock All Items and Find All Items since we didn't want to gate any items behind such extremely difficult achievements. The types of rewards are wide ranging from simple upgrades to new familiars to crazy boss themed weapons. Unlock items such as Flash Sale, Red Scorpion, Kamikaze Minibot, Ripple Laser, Durandal, Chrono Claw, the Commando Module and many many more! There are, of course, also the usual tweaks and bug fixes. Here is the whole changelog. This update has been many months in the making and it's something the team is very proud of. We hope you enjoy it. Thanks for your support everyone! :) Oh, just in case anybody is experiencing problems with the build or just wants to go back to the previous version for whatever reason, you can revert that by right-clicking Starward Rogue in your library list, selecting properties and then opting into the beta version called 2_004.

[ 2018-10-15 17:09:07 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hey everybody. Things have been pretty busy over at Arcen with AI War 2 set to launch into Early Access in July. You can wishlist that here to be notified when that launches if you're interested.
But now onto Starward stuff. This update mostly contains a bunch of fixes and quality of life refinements, including aesthetic improvements to certain shots, clarified descriptions, item tweaks, 15 updated rooms, hitbox adjustments to some enemies, and more. Here's the whole changelog. A few other notable changes are that some of the late game star backgrounds have been tweaked to reduce glare, we've added outlines to all the enemies to make them stand out more, player location and warp pad destination visibility on the minimap has been improved, and all slot based items now have a colored text prefix signifying which slot they fit into. In addition to that we have the following new achievements: Perfect Clear Boss -- Periphery Perfect Clear Boss -- Metal Legion Perfect Clear Boss --Sunder Perfect Clear Boss --Largesse ("The Humbled") Perfect Clear Boss -- Valor Complete Run With Incredibility - Creator Complete Run With Incredibility - Lilliputian Complete Run With Incredibility - High Speed Danger Complete Run With Incredibility - Corrupting Power Time to hunt down foes and grab some of the most dangerous incredibilities available. Plus, there is also some new content, we have 9 new rooms and one new enemy variant for AuGMENTED -- the Gold Zombot! Additionally, there is a small bit of "new" content, too. Basically, there have been two perks in the code for a while which we thought were appearing but apparently haven't been due to a typo. Ahem. Sorry about that! In any case, those have now been fixed. The "new" Deep Blue mech specialist perks are Beam Buddy Ver2.0 and Beam Buddy ver3.0. We hope you enjoy this update! :) Cheers!

[ 2018-06-05 21:04:40 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hey everybody Here's our first major update since the launch of AuGMENTED and it contains two big changes. Firstly, we have finally managed to track down and fix a longstanding problem with regards to very occasional crashing that could happen. I'll leave Chris to explain this! "FINALLY fixed the longstanding super-infrequent crashing that was happening for some-but-not-all players. This has been a thorn in our side for two years now, but we finally got some excellent help from Unity's engine developers themselves, and it turns out that we were triggering a crash bug somewhere deep in the engine via calls to audio.GetAudioClip(). That's now on their list to investigate and fix, but in our case now that we know what the problem actually is, we've switched approaches to no longer use that method at all, instead baking the music and voice tracks into the game itself. This is also why it would happen sometimes specifically during tutorials." Phew! So, that should be the last we see of that issue. Many thanks to everyone who has submitted crash reports for this problem, and also to the folks over at Unity for helping us track down what the issue was. Now for the second big change -- the probation overhaul! The whole probation mechanic (those optional little challenges you get at the start of floors 2+) of the game has had a bit of sprucing up thanks to Logorouge and Draco. All rewards for the probations have been improved, 2 new probations have been added, any existing probation issues have been fixed, and there have even been some extra niceties added like SFX and console notifications on success or failure. In addition to these two big changes, there have also been the usual bunch of fixes and balance changes. There is a also "new" sacrifice item for AuGMENTED that was accidentally not set to seed when the expansion launched -- Parasite Armor. We hope you enjoy this update! :)

[ 2018-02-07 23:44:29 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hey everybody Here's our first major update since the launch of AuGMENTED and it contains two big changes. Firstly, we have finally managed to track down and fix a longstanding problem with regards to very occasional crashing that could happen. I'll leave Chris to explain this! "FINALLY fixed the longstanding super-infrequent crashing that was happening for some-but-not-all players. This has been a thorn in our side for two years now, but we finally got some excellent help from Unity's engine developers themselves, and it turns out that we were triggering a crash bug somewhere deep in the engine via calls to audio.GetAudioClip(). That's now on their list to investigate and fix, but in our case now that we know what the problem actually is, we've switched approaches to no longer use that method at all, instead baking the music and voice tracks into the game itself. This is also why it would happen sometimes specifically during tutorials." Phew! So, that should be the last we see of that issue. Many thanks to everyone who has submitted crash reports for this problem, and also to the folks over at Unity for helping us track down what the issue was. Now for the second big change -- the probation overhaul! The whole probation mechanic (those optional little challenges you get at the start of floors 2+) of the game has had a bit of sprucing up thanks to Logorouge and Draco. All rewards for the probations have been improved, 2 new probations have been added, any existing probation issues have been fixed, and there have even been some extra niceties added like SFX and console notifications on success or failure. In addition to these two big changes, there have also been the usual bunch of fixes and balance changes. There is a also "new" sacrifice item for AuGMENTED that was accidentally not set to seed when the expansion launched -- Parasite Armor. We hope you enjoy this update! :)

[ 2018-02-07 23:44:29 CET ] [ Original post ]

It's here! Arcen Games are proud to finally announce the launch of the first Starward Rogue expansion: AuGMENTED. Available now!
This is a bumper content pack for Starward Rogue featuring the following list of goodies: * A new gold floor with unique challenges and rewards * 4 new music tracks composed by Pablo Vega and The Overthinkers * 3 new mechs: The Zephyr, The Paladin, and the Warhog * 90+ new items * 30+ new enemies * 125+ new rooms * 8 new room obstacles such as the pulse trap and the flamethrower turret * 10+ challenge rooms (a new room type exclusive to the gold floors) * 6 new minibosses * 9 new bosses We are also introducing Starward Rogue: Gold Edition which is a package deal featuring both the base game and AuGMENTED. Both AuGMENTED and the Gold Edition will also be on 10% discount until January 31. It's been a lot of work, but AuGMENTED is something we're very proud of over at Arcen Games. Thanks, everybody. Hail to the Hydral! :)
We also wanted to make a special thanks to Windless Zephyr for inspiring the Zephyr mech, and also for providing us with so many episodes of your long-running Starward Rogue series! :)

[ 2018-01-24 17:48:43 CET ] [ Original post ]

It's here! Arcen Games are proud to finally announce the launch of the first Starward Rogue expansion: AuGMENTED. Available now!
This is a bumper content pack for Starward Rogue featuring the following list of goodies: * A new gold floor with unique challenges and rewards * 4 new music tracks composed by Pablo Vega and The Overthinkers * 3 new mechs: The Zephyr, The Paladin, and the Warhog * 90+ new items * 30+ new enemies * 125+ new rooms * 8 new room obstacles such as the pulse trap and the flamethrower turret * 10+ challenge rooms (a new room type exclusive to the gold floors) * 6 new minibosses * 9 new bosses We are also introducing Starward Rogue: Gold Edition which is a package deal featuring both the base game and AuGMENTED. Both AuGMENTED and the Gold Edition will also be on 10% discount until January 31. It's been a lot of work, but AuGMENTED is something we're very proud of over at Arcen Games. Thanks, everybody. Hail to the Hydral! :)
We also wanted to make a special thanks to Windless Zephyr for inspiring the Zephyr mech, and also for providing us with so many episodes of your long-running Starward Rogue series! :)

[ 2018-01-24 17:48:43 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hey everybody, 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. :)

[ 2017-12-19 16:46:53 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hey everybody, 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. :)

[ 2017-12-19 16:46:53 CET ] [ Original post ]

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

[ 2017-12-08 17:38:15 CET ] [ Original post ]

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

[ 2017-12-08 17:38:15 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! We would also like to give a shout out to Youtuber Windless Zephyr, who is part of the inspiration for the upcoming Zephyr mech. Thanks for your Starward Rogue series, Zeph! :) 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.

[ 2017-09-28 20:13:06 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! We would also like to give a shout out to Youtuber Windless Zephyr, who is part of the inspiration for the upcoming Zephyr mech. Thanks for your Starward Rogue series, Zeph! :) 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.

[ 2017-09-28 20:13:06 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hey everyone, Craig here. 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!

[ 2017-01-10 20:40:17 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hey everyone, Craig here. The Difficulty Smoothing updateis 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 Ill 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 weve seen players tear through the final super boss of the game in a matter of seconds, and this was not a rare occurrence. Its 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 werent 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 thestranglehold 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 wasnt 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, weve 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 beenincreased, and we have also added two new variants of pickup -- so its 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) Specificoverly-dangerous ortanky 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 justtoo crowded, making them unusualdifficulty spikes. So thats 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 wouldnt be able to keep improving the game without your help, so its really appreciated. Thanks!

[ 2017-01-10 20:40:17 CET ] [ Original post ]

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? As a result of player feedback (A huge thank you to everyone who gave us feedback!), we found that the perks in the game just weren't up to par. To that end, we ended up of the balance to make the perks actually worthwhile and a hard choice. You probably won't be seeing health and damage perks very much anymore. They've been hit by the nerfbat, but not so hard that they aren't a good choice. In fact, they are now a hard choice to make. Do I want the extra damage or do I want the 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. ;) More Difficulty At Higher Difficulties The game is now going to be harder than it was before, at least at higher levels of gameplay. 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. But Wait!  We're Fair! Despite loving to murder... er, I mean help players, we did make some really nice changes to make the game more fair. No more of 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. 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. Oh, and there aren't many options to heal unless the RNG Gods love you. This means that you're less likely to steamroll your way to the end of the game, 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! Defensive items, on the other hand, were shot by the nerf gun. They're still helpful, but no more buying a ton of them and using them to tank every enemy you encounter. Now that enemies last longer, they can penetrate your defenses easier. Oh, and good luck raising your max health. The amount of things that let you do that have been substantially reduced, which will make a sacrifice shop quite a bit riskier to use. And no to the giant damage boosts or anything. No more 50% changes. Everything is smaller and much more balanced. 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 fire 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 works well in complicated thing corridors. Horrible news time: Misery 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." New Boss!? Misery may have, uh, also created a new boss. So you might notice that there is a new boss that is going to make your life -- well, miserable. That's all his fault. In conclusion: run. Run fast and far to escape the Inferno Cannons. Enjoy! Relevant release notes are versions 1.502 to 1.506 if you haven't been playing the beta.

[ 2017-01-06 01:18:49 CET ] [ Original post ]

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 (ahuge 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 asSavings 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.

[ 2017-01-06 01:18:49 CET ] [ Original post ]

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. Official forum thread on this post.

[ 2016-11-11 19:34:49 CET ] [ Original post ]

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. Official forum thread on this post.

[ 2016-11-11 19:34:49 CET ] [ Original post ]

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. Here is the community brainstorming thread. 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. Enjoy! Chris Official forum thread on this post.

[ 2016-08-05 18:13:37 CET ] [ Original post ]

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. Also, I almost forgot -- Misery wrote up a great guide for you: Some tips and tricks for new or advanced players 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. Official forum thread on this post.

[ 2016-05-06 19:31:25 CET ] [ Original post ]

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. More to come soon! Official forum thread on this post.

[ 2016-03-28 15:16:21 CET ] [ Original post ]

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. More to come soon! Official forum thread on this post.

[ 2016-03-17 18:08:24 CET ] [ Original post ]

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. More to come soon! Official forum thread on this post.

[ 2016-03-17 18:08:12 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build!  This one is about refinement more than anything else.  It has sound effect improvements, various bugfixes, some improved enemies and weapons, and a variety of new xml features if you're into enemy creation or modding. Also!  This one finally puts a nail in the coffin of that one long-term bug we've had with some ricochets not acting as expected in some circumstances.  We'd always see it occasionally, but it was hard to reproduce and even then would be like 1 shot out of 100.  But that 1 shot could be absolutely fatal when playing on Misery mode against a couple of bosses.  So that's a really good one to finally have out of the way -- I think that was our biggest longstanding bug, although not many people actually noticed it. More to come soon! Official forum thread on this post.

[ 2016-03-08 14:59:19 CET ] [ Original post ]

New one for you!  This one has 14 new rooms, a new enemy with 4 variants, a bunch of improved weapons, and more.  "More" includes some bugfixes, as well as the start to a sound-effect-upgrade process.  The game is already rich with sound effects, but we (most specifically Craig, who is doing it) want it even bigger and better. More to come soon! Official forum thread on this post.

[ 2016-02-25 21:45:23 CET ] [ Original post ]

Another biggun!  This one has a ton of balance and exploit adjustments, as well as some important bugfixes surrounding the sacrifice shops in particular.  No more should the sacrifice shops accidentally kill you when you make a purchase -- sorry about that! There are a couple of new enemies, a couple of new familiars and practically-new familiars, and made a number of other powerups more desirable and/or interesting. More to come soon! Official forum thread on this post.

[ 2016-02-19 15:58:55 CET ] [ Original post ]

This one is rather big!  Nothing too giant individually, but there's a whole heck of a lot of things in this one.  First of all, there's 14 new rooms from community members, boss updates and additions, new enemies, updated and overhauled drones, and balance to feats.  Among many, many other things. More to come soon!  Because of the recent layoffs we are in a slower development phase now, so the updates won't be daily.  But there will be one or two a week at the very least, and likely more than that (particularly thanks to community contributions and our awesome volunteers). As I noted last update, we've also resumed working on Stars Beyond Reach, and are now working on our other next project as well (Keith on the one and Blue and I on the other, respectively), so we have a plan for moving forward as a smaller company now. Official forum thread on this post.

[ 2016-02-10 19:49:29 CET ] [ Original post ]

Another two updates!  These one have four enemies, three of which are community-created.  This also fixes the performance-eating aspects of our own recently-added Demesne enemy.  And there was a performance regression in 1.010 in general that is now fixed.  Sorry about all the hitching that was causing -- it was worst on linux, but happening on all three OSes. This new version also brings us to... Unity 5!  Overall that doesn't change a whole lot in your user experience, however it does let us lock the cursor to the window, which I know a lot of folks were really wanting (me too).  I know I made some flubs with firing during recording some videos thanks to my mouse cursor going out of the window before. Aside from that, we spent a huge amount of time -- almost all of our working hours allocated for Starward Rogue on Saturday through today -- on smoother diagonal wall collisions.  That has been a big problem unfortunately, because in version 1.011 it was causing some woes with getting stuck in certain walls and being unable to pick up certain items, which was very frustrating.  Right now we've simply disabled that again, and I'm not sure of any other way around that.  For now we will spend our time working on other unrelated things off the list of things you guys have been asking for tweaks with. More to come soon!  Because of the recent layoffs we are in a slower development phase now, so the updates won't be daily.  But there will be one or two a week at the very least, and likely more than that (particularly thanks to community contributions and our awesome volunteers). We've also resumed working on Stars Beyond Reach, and are now working on our other next project as well (Keith on the one and Blue and I on the other, respectively), so we have a plan for moving forward as a smaller company now. Official forum thread on this post.

[ 2016-02-03 02:16:44 CET ] [ Original post ]

Another update!  This one has bugfixes, a new community-made enemy, a variety of balance tweaks, and more.  This also reduces the number of runs you must win before you get the full 7-floor runs instead of the shorter 5-floor runs. More to come soon! Official forum thread on this post.

[ 2016-01-30 20:54:15 CET ] [ Original post ]

Another day, another update.  This one is a bit sparse, since it was a... challenging day.  That said, this adds two new enemies for you to battle, switches an inept sacrifice room item into an excellent new incredibility, and has a number of bugfixes. More to come tomorrow! Official forum thread on this post.

[ 2016-01-29 02:42:27 CET ] [ Original post ]

A really big update for you today.  First of all, this clears out a ton of our mantis bugtracker issues.  This also allows deadzone setting for your analog sticks, and sets the default back slightly higher again, which is good for your average well-loved 360 controller. More interestingly, perhaps, is that the game is now a lot more aggressive about showing you its actual content variety.  Some folks were hitting a point where they were going "you need more items!"  In a game with 200+ items, that's clearly a problem.  For instance, we made the drop rate of guns so rare that people were sometimes not even finding one gun in a whole run!  Derp. We made a slew of updates to make everything from room designs to items show up with greater frequency while still keeping relative drop frequencies as they were (supposed to be).  The TLDR is that in your average run you'll now encounter far more variety, but the rarer stuff will also be on lower floors more often than not. More to come tomorrow! Official forum thread on this post.

[ 2016-01-28 03:59:30 CET ] [ Original post ]

Two more updates for you today -- thanks for everyone who was giving us feedback with these! 1.006 and 1.007 are, in a lot of respects, not the most exciting releases. However, they do completely rework the underlying input system to have greater compatibility with more gamepads, and in particular the XBox One. There are also a couple of new enemies from community member zharmad! If you're interested in doing modding and additions and submitting them, a reminder is that we vet all those and potentially make tweaks before we include them in the official game. It's a very curated process, so you don't have to worry about quality drops or anything like that. THAT said, the modding capabilities are completely open and you are free to do a total conversion or whatever else you want that doesn't get integrated into our main branch. By all means please do! But a lot of folks are creating a piece of content or two that they then feel like would fit in the main game proper, and that's the bit that we curate with a keen eye. More to come tomorrow, both in terms of polish and in terms of some other new features and content from our own staff. :) Oh, and thanks again for your support! Your positive steam reviews are helping to get the game noticed a lot more, which really means a lot to our ability to continue this sort of thing long-term with the game. We still have a major visibility problem with the game (our own fault for coming out of nowhere), but it seems to be improving.

[ 2016-01-27 02:33:09 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hey everybody, First of all, thanks for your support of the game. It's really a good feeling to see all those positive steam reviews, I have to say. :D Secondly, we've been doing a laundry list of small updates and tweaks to the game based on feedback from the new, expanded group of players for the game. As you know, even having 100ish testers isn't going to catch everything, so again we appreciate your patience while we sort through the things that the larger group of players is now inevitably finding. Most of that stuff isn't too serious, but a few have been, and we've been trying to focus on the most serious stuff first. THAT said, we have a variety of staff with different talents, so you'll notice some less-serious stuff being fixed prior to more-serious stuff in some cases. That's not because we're ignoring the serious thing! It's just two people with different talents working on different things. Also! It's not "bugfixes and balance all the way down." :) We've got some new stuff for you, too. A new boss called "Backfire," and a new music track, have both been added. More stuff is coming soon on both the "more free stuff" front, and the polish-and-wax front. This game definitely has come out of nowhere, so that is something we are very much fighting right now. The response from players has been really positive, but our overall visibility is a bit frighteningly low compared to some of our past releases. So our sales numbers really aren't where we want them to be right now, even though things like our conversion rates and so forth are some of the highest we've ever had. I really want to keep building on this game, and I hope you want to see that also, so be sure and spread the word if this is something you like! We really appreciate it. We'll be back later today with another update for you. :) Official forum thread on this post.

[ 2016-01-25 16:17:24 CET ] [ Original post ]

Starward Rogue is a passion project designed not just by myself, but by a team of other hardcore fans of this subgenre. We have several thousand hours in similar games, and we wanted to do something excitingly new without being completely alien. We had a very tight timeline, so as far as the rest of the world is concerned this game is coming out of nowhere. After months of crunch-mode development we're still finding it hard to stop playing after each run, so hopefully you enjoy it as well as we do! There's a whole lot of new things we want to do with this game, even though it's already gargantuan. If you want to help that happen and you enjoy this type of game -- then tell other people who enjoy this type of game! That sort of word of mouth is what helped us make such huge additions to AI War: Fleet Command over so many years (tons of free updates as well as paid expansions). Anyway, I'm getting way ahead of myself there. At the moment there is more than enough to enjoy -- dozens and dozens of hours at minimum. I think I'm sitting at like 88 hours myself and I really have not mastered everything yet, not remotely. Nor seen all the content outside of unit-testing it. (Others on staff have, though, don't worry! Not to mention the legion of awesome community testers we have had). I also really want to thank all the community testers we've had over the last two and a half months. You guys were invaluable, both in terms of finding bugs and helping us shave off all the rough edges you could find. Not only that, but a number of you actually made content for the game using the modding support, which other players can now see embedded in the full game itself (no need to download anything extra). If you're just coming to the game now (which makes sense, given it just launched), then you're still free to send us things that you make! If you make enemies or whatnot, we'll wire up art for it, vet it, and add it into the game if it makes sense within the larger scope of the game. Or it can stay just an unofficial mod that you made if we don't feel like it quite fits the overall game experience that we want everyone to have. Same deal for item design, room design, and so on. If you like that sort of thing, enjoy the wiki: https://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=Starward_Rogue:Main#XML_Documentation Try not to get too bogged down in the hugeness of it; the entire game's content was built using the same tools that you see there, so you can look at any existing content and make variants, deconstruct what we did, and so on. Anyway, enough about modding: the vanilla game is big and huge and fun and I hope you love it. I got started at an early age (in the early 90s) as a modder and level design enthusiast, so I get happy about modding tools, is all. We'll be doing videos of us playing the game, and can answer tips on specific bosses, weapons, or otherwise. More story and voice acting is coming soon, too, as well as more content drops. Thank you very much for your support of our team -- we couldn't do it without you!

[ 2016-01-22 18:37:32 CET ] [ Original post ]

Starward Rogue is Now Available on Steam and is 10% off!*

A roguelite labyrinth lodged in the side of a star. Dodge gorgeous waves of bullets, claim weapons and upgrades, defeat The Warden, and rescue... Rodney?

*Offer ends January 29 at 10AM Pacific Time

[ 2016-01-22 18:19:55 CET ] [ Original post ]