Hello everyone, time for the monthly dev blog!
This dev blog won't focus on new development since everything made is in the stable version.
In the first part, I'll talk about balancing and difficulty in Rogue: Genesia. Then I'll discuss the future months of development and what is planned!
Game Balancing
Balancing a game is never an easy task.
And there is even a need for balance in the balancing. Having a perfectly balanced game is boring; it simply makes any choice meaningless as you end up with the same power/progression regardless of what you do. This is a trap I've seen quite a few games fall into (not specifically this genre).
Difficulty
One of the major components of balancing is handling the overall difficulty of a game over the time it's played.
Usually, you want it to start low and slowly increment to higher values.
However, what is considered ultra-hard for some players could qualify as easy for others.
This is true for many games, and this is true for Rogue: Genesia as well
My approach was to make the difficulty targeted at medium-core players, in part because I am part of this group, but also because I think it fits most players on Steam who actively look for indie games.
The game features a main progression that is made to be overall "easy" for this type of players so it's not a frustration point and allows players to progress if they want to. Meta-progression is also a tool I use for two purposes:
- Giving tangible progression via the power of the characters, both with stats, effects, and more control over your build.
- Allowing lower-skilled players to out-grind the difficulty if they really need to.
This is something I've seen Death Must Die miss when it first released, with a big progression wall during the second half of the current content (first act) which left a lot of players grinding with almost no progression until they finally beat their first run.
They quickly fixed this and improved the progression since then.
It is still a very good game that I would recommend to fans of the genre!
Challenges
With the main progression of the game clearable for most players, another issue arose: the game is too easy for players with experience or hardcore gamers.
This is the purpose of challenges.
Which I totally shamelessly stole from Idle-Games, I admit!
I had to make all those wasted hours on Anti-Matter dimension worth it.
Challenges are modifiers of a run that add handicaps to players in multiple ways. They can both reduce the power of the players, increase the strength of monsters, or add special rules to alter the way players engage.
Similarly to idle-games, challenges give a reward to help the players push themselves in the form of rewards.
Then, another issue came up:
many players were frustrated by some of the hardest challenges (Like the original Snuffhead's Favourite which was impossible in its first version) even though they were "optional bonus content".
After exchanging with the vocal players about that, the main issue was the fact it gave gameplay advantages locked behind super hard content.
So the best compromise I could find was to simplify these challenges that unlocked content to be completable by most players with a bit of experience, and make hardcore challenges that only unlock cosmetic stuff on "Hard Mode challenges".
This calmed the frustration of players about the hard challenges and allowed the players looking for challenges to be satisfied.
But alas, as the game gets more content, the possibility of getting stronger also increased, so for the most experienced players, even the hardest of the hard challenges became a regular run for them, and a cool suggestion appeared:
Allowing challenges to be leveled up.
This was quite simple to implement (scale the modifiers with the challenge level or increase the world rank (or both)), and allowed almost unlimited difficulty for those hardcore players.
Leveling a challenge doesn't unlock anything and won't ever, as it's only there as a playground for players looking for the most extreme challenges.
Play-style
Another important aspect to balance is the different playstyles that the game allows.
This is important to keep depth in the game to ensure all playstyles allow for equivalent progression.
And while it's not totally voluntary at first, the game ended up with having 5 main (and 2 sub) damage archetypes that have been identified. More are likely to appear as new content is added to the game:
- Raw Power This is the first archetype players will play with; it is quite easy to achieve, has good damage output, and has a lot of cards to support it.
- Metal transmutation This is also a popular damage archetype that allows players to have both good defense and offense. It takes a little bit of set-up to obtain it but ends up having decent damage output.
- Lunar Inferno Sub-archetype very similar to Metal transmutation, is a damage archetype that scales off both defense and damage mitigation, with the price of reducing other Power damage sources. The strongest archetype early-game but falls behind other archetypes in the late game.
- Blood Transmutation This one, while sounding similar to Metal Transmutation, is in fact very different. It is likely one of the strongest archetypes but also one of the hardest to properly achieve, as it requires a lot of artifacts and cards to obtain but has very good damage output while giving survivability.
- Faith This one received a lot of improvement during the 0.9.1 Update, adding a whole bunch of cards to support this damage archetype. It is one of the strongest ones but also one of the hardest to play with. It sure gives humongous damage output but also makes you very weak and easy to die as any damage you take is greatly increased (and negative armor applies AFTER damage mitigation).
- Defense Piercing & Defense Shredding This last Main Archetype has a low initial damage but is also the damage archetype that can reach the highest value due to the ramp-up nature of this, so it's very useful for high corruption growth challenges where other archetypes may fail damage-wise. Update 0.9.1.3 also buffed this archetype as it now slightly scales with the damage multiplier of your weapon. I'm still listening to feedback about this change. It relies a lot on Attack-speed.
- Silk Edge This Sub-archetype also relies on Defense piercing to scale, transmuting your base power and power multiplier into Defense piercing. It was relatively weak prior to 0.9.1.3 buff, and it should be more viable now. It is recommended to use this archetype with other damage archetypes to help clear the weak enemies and let defense shredding kill the strongest ones.
I try to make sure all of the archetypes are worth it, with both upsides and downsides, so they are situational and not always optimal.
For example, Blood Transmutation or Metal transmutation are weaker in Glass bone challenges compared to raw damage or faith build, for example.
Nerfing approach
Like many games, balancing is not just about buffing things up when they are weak; sometimes, you also have to make the hard decision of nerfing things that are just too good. I try to nerf things only when it's necessary.
Overall, my approach to deciding if I need to nerf something is that I ask myself 2 questions: How strong is it? How easy/hard is it to obtain?
If something is easy but not as strong, then it's fine too; it may need a bit of tweaking, but usually, it doesn't need nerfing.
If something is strong but also hard to obtain, then I think it's fine to keep it slightly too strong at the price of making it harder to obtain.
Death scythe is an example of it; it is by far the strongest weapon of the game, basically making any number of HP points a detail due to it either one-shotting smaller monsters or removing %HP of the strongest monsters.
However, I also have to make sure it doesn't completely invalidate other things to not make the game a race to obtain this one thing that wrecks absolutely everything.
(which is also why the most optimal way to reach infinity now uses cleaver instead of Death scythe as it's a very hard weapon to obtain now)
If something is both strong and easy to obtain, then it very likely needs a nerf. Complete and perfect immortality also falls into that category.
A recent example of this is the Throwing knife during the 0.9 Update, which was both very strong (high damage output), easy to obtain (it was a weapon you can obtain right at the beginning), and even given immortality (keeping dash button pressed).
Small tweaks
Small adjustments that I want to make in the near future include a slight nerf to the necromancer and a minor buff to the lava titan to smooth out the difficulty curve.
Soundtrack
When the game first released, the OST wasn't well-received, and I often received feedback that it felt off.
It wasn't an easy decision, but based on this feedback, I decided to look for another composer to work with.
In the end, I collaborated with 3 composers on the "new OST" (though there are still 2 small tracks left from the previous composer as I believe they fit the game very well).
So far, the feedback on the new OST has been very positive, with even negative reviews appreciating the game's OST despite criticisms of the game itself.
Discussions with the composers and iolaCorp have started about selling the OST on Steam.
The goal is to have the composers receive a revenue share from the sale of the OST to please everyone and also allow players who wish to support the composers.
Additionally, I've started uploading the game's OST to YouTube for anyone to listen to.
1.0 Release
In the comments of the 0.9.1 release post and in the previous blog post, I've seen many players eagerly awaiting the 1.0 release of the game.
While I know this is a good sign that many players feel like the game is getting into a good state for 1.0, I want to remind everyone that there is still one major update to land before that.
I don't want to give an exact release date as nothing is certain as of now. An optimistic prediction would be July/August, but it's likely to be later.
I initially wanted the Early Access to only last 1 year, but the amount of things I ended up adding (and want to add) to the game greatly went beyond my expectations.
Nothing major changed in the general plan for updates, so I think it's still fine in the end.
0.10 in the meantime
While development hasn't started yet, I want to begin actively working on it during the second half of February. I want to address the last big/medium issues that have been reported so far, and then focus on advancing the game again.
0.10 will focus on enabling weapon modifiers, introducing a new variant for the second zone, as well as the 5th zone, which will likely require a lot of work too.
Test for equipment
I've been very hesitant to add equipment, but I think it'll be worth spending around 1 week during the 0.10 beta to experiment with equipment. I'll make a branch for it for players who wish to try out the equipment system and gather feedback.
Based on the feedback, I may want to push the equipment system to completion or completely scrap the idea for good.
Talent rework
Another thing that I wish to do, but more likely for 1.0 than for 0.10, is a small rework of the talent system.
The idea would be to create a small upgrade tree for each talent, where each talent gains 1 upgrade point when they level up.
The idea is to make talent upgrading a bit more interesting, adding a bit of choice in the way talents are upgraded, and maybe even making active talents lean toward either more passive or active upgrades.
In addition, this would make the unlocks of other talents easier to understand since I could simply add a node that unlocks the next tier of a talent.
This is just an idea I'm exploring since a few day, but I believe it could be a good addition without denaturing the game. That will depend on how much time I want to spend into it