Another month, another monthly Dev-Blog!
Open Beta
The announcement for the open beta has brought a lot of players to test out the beta. So far, the percentage of players playing on the beta has gone from 1% to 6%.
It's still a small number, but it makes me more confident in the overall stability of the 0.9.1.
There are still a few bugs popping up left and right, but nothing too major (outside of the bugs I've talked about during the previous announcement).
0.9.1 expected release time
If all goes well, I hope for the 0.9.1 update to be ready before Christmas!
Things done this month
Let's talk a bit about the lot of changes I've made during this month.
New elites modifiers
The last Beta update (update 11) also added new elite modifiers that appear in rank C+.
They should bring a bit more variety to elites. They are slightly more rare but more powerful than the existing modifiers.
The most powerful one also increases the drop reward from elites, so they are a great opportunity for the player!
New Quality of Life (QoL)
Since the main blocker to the update was the sprite/animation creation, adding more content would just end up delaying the update even more.
So, I focused a lot on improving QoL or adding more UI that I would need for the next update.
Weapon Tab
It doesn't serve much purpose yet, but it was still asked a few times.
This tab allows you to know which weapons you already own and how many slots you have left.
This tab also shows what weapon modifiers you have (even if that's still a bit WiP).
It will become important in the next update when weapon modifiers are properly introduced. You can also check more information about your weapon damages.
Weapon Damage Graph
Talking about weapon damage stats,
At the end of a run, you can check the damage graph to see the damage of all weapons during a run. You can identify which weapon was your best at which time.
To access it, simply click the damage source on the left, and a small graph will be displayed.
You can choose either to have a linear display or a logarithmic one.
You can also check the kill count of the weapon over time!
This graph will also greatly help me balance weapons as I will likely receive more feedback about weapon performances.
Stacked Damage Numbers
Another Quality of Life improvement I wanted to add to the game for a long time was stacked damage numbers.
It took me a bit of time to find a way to have each enemy possess a number that follows them without absolutely tanking performance.
After a bit of experimentation, I've found a way to technically achieve this. This should greatly improve the visibility of the damage you dealt to enemies.
Of course, there is an option to disable it or have it together with the old damage numbers.
Health Bars
Using the incredible technology of particles following an enemy, I finally added an option that allows every single enemy to have a small, simple health bar over their head.
After playing with it enabled, I don't think I can go back to not having them on.
In addition, I've improved all health bars to color the bar for Damage over Time that will apply to the entity (for both the player and enemies).
Zone Selection
A change that was added recently is the possibility to now choose which zone variant you are going into. It's not much since there is only a variant for the first zone, but it will be a good addition when more zone variants are added to the game.
This change will also allow me to add more card specifics to a biome or have synergy required set biome to be obtainable without frustrating the player who is being locked out of a card by the RNG.
Rework of the Sound Design
As many know, the sound effects of Rogue: Genesia are lacking in many aspects (while some other aspects are liked by players).
I've recently hired and worked together with a sound designer to improve the SFX of Rogue: Genesia and add new ones.
So far, our focus has been to slightly improve the existing sounds, either by cleaning them up or layering them with other sounds to make them more satisfying or adding a bit of depth.
Our next focus will be to add proper sounds for weapons and enemy types (only the enemies of the forest biome have specialized sounds for them).
Soul-Card Pool Issue
In this month's Dev-Blog, I also want to talk about an issue that has been slowly growing over the updates: Soul-Card pool issues.
When the game was first released, there were around 60 passive soul-cards and around 18 weapons. One year later, and this number is closer to 200 passive soul-cards and 40 weapons.
The available card pool suffers from two very opposing issues:
1. There are too many cards available in the early game, greatly bloating it and making building more RNG-prone.
2. There are not enough cards for the late game, leading to runs looking more and more alike.
Update 0.9 made a bit of an attempt at fixing these two issues, pushing higher rarity cards slightly later into the game, but also locking some cards behind others, and by adding biome-specific cards to the game.
While I think it was an improvement, it was far from enough.
I also received a lot of suggestions to increase the number of bans the player has, but this is just focusing on the result rather than fixing the root of the issues.
This would also lead to players spending a lot of time simply banning cards in the early game.
I've been thinking of a better solution for a bit of time, and I think I've finally found one and also wanted to discuss it with you.
The first step was made during Update 10 of the beta:
Adding a level requirement to some cards.
I focused on cards that had heavy drawbacks and were rarely taken in the early game or were overall not the most liked and pushed them back to later in the game.
This cleans up the early game pool for higher value cards and keeps those cards to better define builds already started by the player, so they can make better decisions when they appear. (Examples of cards I pushed back on level are Compromise, Clumsy, or Tradeoff.)
For now, the change is still minor, as the higher level requirement is only level 50 (around the end of the first zone).
(Of course, Shop-keeper has a lower requirement than other characters due to the lower level he can reach.)
Later on, I would like to move build-defining cards to level 30 (cards like Armor-less, Average, Transmutations...) and make them unlock a lot of additional linked cards, adding specialization to these builds that would only unlock at higher levels.
Of course, a player could take multiple build-defining cards and mix them together.
This should keep the freedom of building while allowing players to keep control of the cards they have available. All while keeping the early game from being bloated.
This is going to require a lot of work and is very likely to greatly change the balance of the game, but ultimately I don't see a better solution to the problem here, especially as B and A ranks will be added into the game and require even more cards.
If you have any feedback on the idea or want to discuss it, you are greatly invited to share your thoughts in the comment section (or the Steam forum/discord)
What to Expect with 0.10
Since we are approaching the release of 0.9.1, that also means we are getting closer to the development of Update 0.10!
This update will have the major rework of the soul-card pools I just spoke about.
It'll obviously include the addition of the B-rank difficulty and the 5th zone.
Weapon modifiers are on the list, as well as a variant for the 2nd zone, "Desert of the Giants."
There is a lot more to be added as usual, but these are the BIG things to be added.
(I mean, 0.9.1 was supposed to just include new enemies for snow biome...)