Welcome to another Soulstone Survivors devlog! Today we got some interesting stuff to share. A sneak peak of a new character, a new debuff, new soundtrack and more!
As we progress further into development, we also invite you to sign up to our new mailing list and be among the first to find out when its released!
Sneak Peeks
Colombo and Alex have been working on some new, interesting stuff. Lets just say that this one is a boney one… can you guess which character this will be? Let us know in the comments!
We also thought it would be really cool to share another little secret. After working on this new feature, Lucas has reported he has been having some weird dreams… finding a lot of black cats on the street… we still have no idea why…
Options Reorganized
Over time we have added a ton of options for you to play with in the Options menu and it was getting pretty cluttered, so for the next update Juan has worked on reorganizing and fixing a few minor issues with this panel, check it out:
New Death Soundtrack
We are also fans of Gama’s work here at the Game Smithing office and he has been cooking up a new soundtrack for the sad moment in the game where you get unalived, and he wanted to share a small sample of what he got in the works:
Behind The Scenes of Void Hunters Design
Since you all seemed to enjoy our beautiful sketch of the Unholy Cathedral boss and fight, we though of sharing even more sketches! This time around, we wanted to talk about how we approach character design! At this stage in the game, when designing a new character we generally start by first looking at what skill types and fantasies are under represented in the existing characters, to help us guide the theme and what sort of mechanics will be expected.
“What if the thing went around and as you move it keeps its distance…?”
Once those are defined, we make a high level decision about the theme and name of the class this Void Hunter will represent and what weapons it will use, but still subject to change. Once we are happy, the first thing we decide is the character’s ascension, which helps us nail down exactly what the general theme of the character will be both for gameplay mechanics and visuals. For the Demon Hunter, for example, we wanted a Void Hunter that uses ranged weapons but also dips into chaotic magic, so the class felt like an obvious answer. Our theme for the Demon Hunter is a Void Hunter that through his mastery of hunting the most corrupted demons of the void, learned to harness this same power and even control said demons to do his bidding, but still resists the temptation to become corrupted himself.
“… then maybe the thing makes these cross yellow lines (that I dont want to spoil what they represent) go that direction? / ah yeah, that would be awesome!”
After that is out of the way, we start talking about the skills themselves. At this point we already know what skill types each weapon will have, and these will have a big impact not only on the visual theme of the skill but also in what the skill does, mechanically speaking.
Designing skills is actually quite challenging, since we have to be mindful of our game’s limitations, such as the top down point of view, auto casted skills, crazy scaling over a match, performance implications and how often each skill gets used, etc. At this point we try to come up with unique mechanics that feel refreshing to play with, but that also can fill gaps in our huge roster of skills, thinking not only of how the skills will work but how they compliment the existing content in the game. This is usually a very long process, and in the end we hope it turns out to be a fun new character!
This was all we had for today! Hope you enjoyed what we had to show. Keep an eye out for news, I have a feeling you won’t regret it. Let us know what you would like us to talk about next!
We hope you all have a lovely day or night,
~Soulstone Team