Greetings, Void Hunters!
The journey has been long and arduous… years have passed, hair has been lost, what little remained turned white… but the time is finally here… we have officially restarted development on Rogue Soulstone!!
To celebrate this joyous occasion, we spoke to Victor Ferraz, a good friend of ours and amazing artist, to comission a new art piece that represents this new era for the game, and man… are we excited about whats coming!
Now, to be honest, this post is more symbolic than anything! We have actually restarted development on Rogue Soulstone for a few months now but we are finally ready to talk about it!
Rogue Soulstone is going Multiplayer
First and foremost, we are officially announcing that Rogue Soulstone will support online co-op multiplayer! From the beginning, one of our main inspiration for Rogue was Risk of Rain 2. We wanted to create a fast-paced action RPG, with fluid movement, depth to explore different builds, create crazy synergies and that feeling of power (which also became a core concept of Soulstone Survivors!), but we just didn't feel confident enough to promise it would be multiplayer. We always felt like the game wouldnt be complete without it, but with our tiny team of just 2 at the time, we just couldn’t commit to such a bold pursue and expect we would make it great.
However, over the last few years developing Soulstone Survivors, we not only learned a lot from you, our community, but we also built a team of 11! We became a really well oiled machine, a team that works very efficiently and well together, and that gives us the confidence to be a bit bolder, and really go for the game we wanted to create from the get go.
As we got closer and closer to the full release of Soulstone Survivors, we started thinking of the next steps for Rogue. All we had was a very simple proof of concept prototype, which is still what you can see in our screenshots and in our very very old and simple trailer in our steam page (ah, the nostalgia…), and an infinite list of improvements, fixes and new systems we wanted to see in the game. Multiplayer was at the top of the list, and we knew that to make it truly great, the game had to be built around it.
It was a really cool proof of concept but boy is it unfinished!
And that is what we decided to do. We restarted the project from scratch, and have been working for the last few months purely on our netcode. It sounds a bit boring when we talk about it but its actually pretty cool stuff! We know all too well that to turn Rogue Soulstone into a truly great game will take time, and today, we wanted to share with you our development plan, which we foresee will still take a good couple of years of development time:
Step 1 - Netcode, architecture and character movement
To begin with, we are working on the core technology of the game. For what we are trying to build, the character movement and netcode will be central parts of the gameplay experience. It defines requirements and restrictions that will shape the entire game. Even simple stuff here can drastically change the game that gets made. For example, how high a character can jump defines which ledges are reachable, how high they need to be, how spaced out they can be… while how fast a character moves defines how big a level must be, how quickly projectiles will move and much much more. When you dash, do you glide a little or a lot? Do you keep momentum? How does that feel to play with? This is where we are right now, with the following work being done:
Matheus, our technical director, is heading the development of this technology, creating a low level networking library that we have control over and can support exactly the needs of our game;
The design team is blocking out prototype levels, where we can not only test the early character movement code we are developing, but also understand the dynamics of the game more in depth, how much verticality levels need, how big is too big, or too small, how fast the player should move, etc.
As mentioned this step has been in development for a few months now, and is taking shape. It still feels a bit too early to share footage of our early tests, but we are getting there, with a networking architecture that already feels quite robust and flexible.
Step 2 - Pre-production and prototyping
Once we have the core technology in place and we are confident enough that we are not building a castle on sand, we will expand the team on Rogue Soulstone to start developing and prototyping more fine-grained gameplay mechanics. Here we will already understand “what the game wants to be”, what maps we are trying to create… and with that knowledge we can take an informed approach. Here’s what this step entails:
Elaboration and development of more specific gameplay systems (progression paths, enemy behaviours, skills, fine tuning of character control, etc);
First art pass, where we understand the breadth of the content we will need to produce and can develop an art style that not only is a good fit for the game but to our team. Here we will start prototyping and exploring art pipelines to make the work efficient, once we understand where we want to go;
Hand in hand development of sound identity for the game, to support the art and make it stand out;
Prototyping and early stages of closed testing, with select members from our community joining in and helping us to shape up the game in the right path from the beginning. Your feedback has always been key for us in Soulstone Survivors, and we want to develop Rogue Soulstone in the same manner.
Step 3 - Full Production
This is where a game starts to really flourish, but also to harden. As the complexity of the project grows, it becomes harder and harder to change directions, which is why we will only get to this point once we are extremely confident with the plans developed in Step 2. This is where we go all hands on deck, and our entire team will focus on making the best content and systems we can for the game to offer a truly complete experience. In some ways, this is the straight forward part of the process, but also the longest, as it accounts for the “meat” of the game. We are talking about stuff such as:
Develop further progression and late game systems that involve more knowledge and mastery of the game;
Crank out a ton of models/textures/UIs… you name it;
Produce multiple soundtracks with a clear direction, in addition to sound effects;
Hardcore frequent testing and balancing of the entire experience, polishing up systems as we go, improving usability along the way;
Near future
While we feel this is the safest approach for our team and company, where we ramp up development on the game in stages, it also means it will still take a bit of time before we are ready to share a new demo or trailer, even though we are aiming to have those sometime next year! To bridge this gap, we will start posting a new Rogue Soulstone devlog series whenever we have cool stuff to show. It might start off with more technical stuff, but we want to keep you up to date on what is going on with the game moving forward, and you can see our first post here!
We are really excited to start working on Rogue again and hope you’ll come along for the ride!
What’s next for Game Smithing
We’ve made a post on the Soulstone Survivors page discussing the plans we have for the team as whole. In short, we will continue to support Soulstone Survivors with new content, and we will also develop a new, smaller multiplayer game! This smaller game is already using the same tech that is being developed for Rogue, and is helping us to find & fix bugs and mature the netcode technology such that by the time we reach steps 2 and 3 of this plan, the netcode technology has been proven in production. The idea here is that Matheus will split his time between building the tech & character movement for Rogue as well as supporting the use of the tech in the other project (for example, by fixing bugs that may arrive related to it, etc.).
This also means that in the meantime between Soulstone Survivors and Rogue Soulstone, you will hopefully have another cool game to try out! We will share more details about it very soon(tm)!
Wouldn’t it just be faster to commit fully to Rogue Soulstone?
Given the stage we are in with Rogue Soulstone, it might be counter intuitive, but it would likely take around the same time, while being a whole lot riskier in many ways. These initial stages of a game are kind of like a pregnancy stage… you can’t put together 9 pregnant women to create a child in one month haha, what that means here is that until there is a clear coding architecture and direction to follow, anything that gets created has a good chance of being discarded later on.
So what we are doing now, is taking these initial experimentation stages that likely would be entirely discarded for Rogue Soulstone, and using this effort to make a separate, much simpler game, with “simpler” being the keyword. Since it is a game with limited scope in all senses, and with a much simpler networking layer, it allows us to move quickly and test all areas of the netcode more easily.
In addition to that, being its own game, means it will see the full lifecycle of development way earlier than Rogue Soulstone would. That means that in just a few months we will go from early testing to closed testing with players, to public testing and finally release, putting the netcode to the test in a real world scenario, with real players from all around the world. We will of course do everything we can to shield ourselves from networking issues, after all we want this third game to be great as well, but it will be our first time releasing anything with multiplayer, and this game will give us that experience in a compact development period.
And in the end, the fast development of this third game, will revert to a ton of benefits for Rogue, and help us find any issues with our netcode early on, giving us time to take critical decisions earlier in the project. If all goes well, we have officially proven that our netcode works well and feel more confident to build the game on a solid foundation, and if we run into issues, we can then iron then out much earlier, ensuring that Rogue Soulstone has the best chances to be great.
So is this other game just a test project, an experiment?
Not at all! Ok, maybe just a little bit. We are actually very excited about this game as well, we have been playing it on our Friday Game Nights and every week we enjoy it more and more. It is very much its own thing, it has a very different vibe from Soulstone Survivors AND from Rogue Soulstone, it feels really fresh and so simple that almost makes us wonder “how come this game doesn’t exist yet?”
We will talk more about it very soon and you will be able to judge it for yourself, but we really feel there is something pretty special in this game, and it just feels like the perfect fit for the moment we are in, limited scope, different, exciting, and super useful for us as a company even if all goes wrong. It’s also proving to be a great test bed for co-op mechanics, and make no mistake, its a simple game… but that doesnt stop us from adding quite a bit of depth to it!
Conclusions
We hope you are excited as we are for the future of Rogue Soulstone! We hope it won’t be too long before we start sharing some more exciting stuff from the game, and we hope to have you for the ride as it gets developed and evolves with our devlogs!
We know a lot of people are looking forward to playing Rogue Soulstone and we are looking forward to it as well. We would love you’d come with us on this journey and help us develop the game just like so many have helped us develop Soulstone Survivors.
If you have any questions, please let us know in the comments and we’ll do our best to answer them!