Hello Everyone!
New year just happened (well, it's already been nine days), and what a year.
Back in May, when I started the development of Rogue: Genesia, I did not expect the success it would have back then!
I want to thank you all
For the success you allowed Rogue: Genesia to have during 2022!
I'm also very impressed by the time players spent in Rogue: Genesia, with an average play-time of 20 hours 45 minutes and a median of 10 hours 11 minutes.
That means more than half of the players have played for more than 10 hours!
I would also like to improve my communication about the game on Steam, and bring monthly news to update you guys about the progress of the game, especially during major beta where there are no small update in the game, and I'm starting now!
December 2022
December is a busy month: Christmass, New years eve (and birthday), slowed down progress during the last third of December. However, I still have a lot of progress to show you guys about the beta:
The Major Update 0.8 is still expected to be released during march
Beta is already available to anyone, you simply have to join the discord and check into the beta-announcements channel to see how you can join the beta!
Avatar
While most of the work has been put into the base system, a few avatars already been created
There is still many unfinished stuff to do, like the ability to buy them, putting achievement to unlock some of them, and adding a few more. I want to target six unique avatars for the 0.8 major update,
But the main issues at the moment are the animation as I've still not found anyone to make them, so this is something that can put the update behind schedule.
Talents
Similarly to Avatar, Talent has the basic system done and working
There is an active talent for each weapon that allow you to start with the weapon of your choice if you unlocked the talent, and I've started adding active ability to some of these talent, but there is a huge amount of ability to make (about 22) so it's gonna be a big task that'll slowly be completed over time.
The player will also gain one passive ability slot for each new difficulty completed after E rank (so you can only have 2 slot as of now) a slot increase is planned to be added in soul-shop later on.
There are only four passive talents for now, but more are planned during the beta.
They can also become interesting game-play modifier
Events
0.8 will also see the addition of real events. where you will have a situation with multiple choice.
The base system is working but it is now lacking content for it, which as the other features will be added during the beta
Optimization
Optimization is a concern to many player and I've seen many request to improve on it, so I'll respond to this topic here, and it's gonna be a bit savvy.
Optimization has been a major concern to me during the whole developement of the game, and I've spent a big amount of time on it, however, there is a limitation to the optimization that can be done.
Graphic Usage
I've seen many people complaining about the graphic usage of Rogue: Genesia when it's simply a 2D pixel art game.
Rogue: Genesia is not a 2D game, it's a fully 3D game, having modern lighting, shading and post-processing, running on Unity High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP).
This means that whatever I do to improve performance there is a limit to what can be removed before the game simply become ugly or lose it's art-style.
The lowest quality is the maximum of the game graphics that I can remove.
Also, Unity HDRP have a base graphic cost that simply can't be removed, even with nothing on screen, some people will have no performance or simply can't run the game.
Inconsistant framerate
There is moment when the game that was running nicely in the beginning simply come to a crawl in late game. This framerate issues is dues to the CPU usage of the game, and have nothing to do with the graphic card.
You can only have so many projectile and enemies interacting with each other before the performance start to tank, This is mainly dues to the collision detection simply being expensive. Imagine each thousands of projectiles having to check if they enter collision with hundred of enemies each frames, that make hundred of thousand of collision to check.
And then ?
So far, I've reached the maximum of my capabilityabout the optimization of the game.
I don't see anything that I can do to improve the game optimization (that will have a significant impact).
This is why I've hired someone, with a lot more experience and knowledge about games optimizations to work on it. I hope that the person will be able to bring improvement on the matter.
2023 RoadMap
My hope is for the game to reach 1.0 near the end of 2023, there is a huge amount of work still left to be done in the game, but there is still a few feature I would like to add into the game:
Making all the World tier up to A
Each majors updates after 0.8 will add a new world-tier.
0.9 is hoped to be released during early summer, adding C-tier world and a few other things.
Adding more variety
While new tier will add new zone and increase variety, always going through the same forest biome with the same enemies can be a bit boring, this is why I would like to slowly increase variety of enemies and environment.
I don't know yet when it'll happen, but I would like to add zone-variant. For example having a snowy pine biome instead of the normal forest, having its exclusive enemies.
Also adding sort of "curse" over the zone or stage, that will apply modifiers to gameplay.
Having a stage with more defined enemies, instead of having the mash-up of all enemies we have now.
More content
Of course, more content, having more cards, more buff/debuff, new boss, new talent, new avatar, new achievements...