Welcome to our second Soulstone Survivors Devlog!
This has been another busy week at the studio and while some stuff is still a secret we want to keep secret, we are super excited to share some of the cool stuff we are working on!
Dev Talk #3
We have recently released our 3rd Dev Talk on YouTube!! In these videos we talk about various aspects of the development of the game in detail and you might even catch some early sneak peeks about upcoming content in there! We have three of them up and running and you can expect more of them to come. Check it out below:
New Soundtrack
As we have showed in our previous Devlog, Gama has now finished the new soundtrack that is coming with some exciting new content for the game (which we don’t want to spoil just yet!), and we wanted to show you all a bit of the process of what it is like to record and edit it.
This is @lizett.tt with her amazing voice, recording a part of the vocals that went into this track:
And this is Gama himself, jamming to the beats in style:
A few words from Gama
“In this track, I recorded 2 singers, a girl from Ukraine and a guy from Belarus. Then, I recorded them several times and created a small choir. The main elements were the voice and the organ, heard in our last devlog, that fit very well with the next upcoming gameplay theme in mind.”
Automated Testing Framework
This is our brand new automated testing framework. Because of the sheer volume of player characters, enemies, summons, skills and so on, it is virtually impossible for us to manually test every combination of them to ensure the game is stable.
To help with this, Max, one of our programmers has been working on this tool which runs a whole lot of tests and tries to identify if something is not right. For example: we spawn/recycle every last entity in the game; cast every last skill; ask entities to move around the map, etc.
If anything goes wrong, the system can tell us what went wrong for example: an entity was unable to move in the expected time given its configured speed. Or an exception was thrown when spawning this entity.
These are essentially sanity checks which should catch most simple errors before they make their way to you folks. Over time, we plan to improve the tool to test more sophisticated scenarios and identify harder issues.
Memory Analysis and Improvements
Anderson, one of our programmers has been working on improving the memory consumption of the game. After a ton of memory profiling and analyzing a lot of data, we found a few surprising results and a few big wins we can address with changes to the code base, so hopefully we will be able to considerably reduce memory usage over the next few updates.
Character Concepts
Alex, our 2D artist has worked on a lot of the cool stuff we see in-game. He is currently working on some new super secret stuff, but today we wanted to showcase some of the Concept Art he has done for the Engineer character!
Still talking about the art of the game, (Fernando) Colombo, our 3D artist also turns these stunning concepts into what we see in-game! Check it out:
Damage Area Visibility Improvements
Lucas, one of our programmers has been looking into an issue that has been pestering our players for a long time. Some of our skills VFX, more specifically Ice Vortex, Blizzard, Frozen Shard, Poison Puddle, Weaking Shot and Napalm Blast were overlapping with the damage areas which would make them hard to see at times. We’ve implemented a few changes to the shader code, and you can check out the before and after below:
A few words from Lucas
"Damage areas being overlapped by VFX has always been an issue of the game and it can make the game way more difficult than it should be. With our push towards more production quality and polish, we are also working on these kinds of quirky problems.”
Meta Progression Toggle
Juan has now finished the implementation of this new feature that allows you to toggle multiple parts of your meta progression. With new UI and other user experience improvements such as proper controller support and further testing to verify all is working well.
This was all we had to show for today’s Devlog ya’ll! It has been a blast to be able to continue developing the game alongside our player base and we are very excited for the future of the game.
Let us know in the comments below which of these excites you the most and, if there is anything else you are curious about and would like us to showcase! 👀
We also want to remind you about our new mailing list!, You can sign up by clicking here!
We hope you all have a great day,
~ Soulstone Team