Welcome to the first ever Soulstone Survivors Devlog!
With this new series, we want to bring you a bit closer to us, and share a little bit of everything that goes behind the scenes on the development of the game. We are working on a bunch of stuff but we made a special selection for today, so lets get started!
New Soundtrack and SFX
For the past few weeks, our sound expert and guru has been working on something GRAND!! To say the least. It does sound like I’m getting married on Halloween or something. Take a listen to this snippet of what he has been cooking:
A few words from Gama
“In this part of the track that you just listened to, the voices are very evident, and might already give you a pretty good hint on what is coming, can you all guess what it could be? This track is the first time I’ve used breakcore and drum’n’bass elements together, so it has been really interesting to compose!”
Gama has also been working on new sound effects for the Myrmidon’s ascension that will be coming with the next update, check it out:
Performance Improvements - Collision Detection
Given how insanely the game can scale, we are working on a new collision detection system to be used by most of the skills in the game. This new system is multithreaded and will make much better use of your CPU, and while it is still in early tests, it is showing considerable gains so far:
While you can definitely see the difference in the video above, keep in mind that "FPS" is not a great metric for speed. A much better metric is "time per frame", and using our internal performance analysis tool, we can have a better idea of the actual results:
In this test, we can see that the average time per frame was reduced from 210ms to 35ms, 83% faster than before.
A few words from Allan
“Please keep in mind these are still early tests, and these results will vary greatly based on your device and what skills are being used, but I must say I’m very excited with the results so far. Other folks on the team are working on different performance areas, so I’m confident that over the next few updates we can score some big wins in this sense!”
Quality of Life
Please, come in and don’t mind the placeholders. With this new UI feature Juan has been working on, you will finally be able to enable and disable various features the game has to offer such as your skill tree, central skill tree, weapon stats and so on, giving you a lot more control over how you play the game.
A few words from Juan
“You will be able to play without all the different modifiers, and it's interesting to see how this affects and changes the gameplay. With everything enabled, the character becomes considerably stronger. Regarding the implementation, it was more about identifying where all the resources were added to the player and then enabling/disabling them individually and making sure only the right stuff gets applied. In the end you only really notice the colossal difference, especially with the skill tree, when you're without it!”
Better Communication
It has been quite a ride so far. The game has been changing a lot and we are continuing to work hard to deliver the best game we possibly can, but one crucial and very important change we want to make is to be more transparent and open with you, our community, about what we are currently working on, make sure that the curious minds can be satiated.
This devlog is the first step in our masterplan, but not all of it! We are planning a bunch of different stuff, including regularly scheduled Q&A’s, State of The Game videos, and will also be starting a new mailing list!
You can sign up to our new mailing list clicking here, even though it will probably be a little bit before we send out the first edition!
And of course, if you would like to see more posts like this, or have other ideas of things you would like to know from us, do let us know in the comments! We read... everything👀!
We hope you have a great day,
~ Soulstone Team