Hello everyone!
Had a bit rough time this update. I ended up getting very sick for over two weeks at the end of January and just as I was getting better my kids and wife caught it. So February was spent mostly either being sick, or taking care of sick snotty children. That being said, given the amount of time I was actually able to work on it, I'm quite pleased with this update overall. This is the first update of the new year so I'll give a bit of an overview of what I'm planning for this final phase of development.
Development Road Map:
The Final Year:
We're finally here, Year 3, the final and most important phase of Rogue Fable IVs development. The foundations are solid. The systems are all in place. We have a mass of content on the table. Now its time to turn all of this into something tight, cohesive, and unmistakably polished. This is the year where everything gets refined, tightened, reworked and pushed to the highest possible level. Combat should feel punchier, cleaner and more deliberately tactical. The whole dungeon should look incredible. Full of endless details, unique features and thematic flavor. The user interface should look professional, truly professional. I already know that this is going to be the most demanding year yet but this is where the biggest leap in quality will happen. This is the final push to make Rogue Fable IV, and the series as a whole, feel complete.
Presentation:
The goal is to make the game look good. Very good. There is a definite line between hobby projects and professional indie games that I intend to cross. Everything from the user interface to levels and combat animation, I want it all to look clean, complete and professional. My art skills have now reached the point where I'm actually able to achieve this level of polish as long as I invest the time. I'm honestly super excited to work on this and see just how good the game can actually look.
Detailed Levels: I plan to add a TON of unique objects and structural flourishes to every zone and level in the game. The trick here is simply achieving a certain mass of 'stuff' density and thematic cohesion so that every level in the game just shines with detail and unique flavor. Every time the player descends to a new level should be a powerful "wow look at this place!" moment.
Ambient Animation: I want the world to 'breath' even when the game is idle. Characters, status effects, clouds, slow projectiles, bombs and especially the level itself should all have subtle animations that add motion and a sense that the world is alive. I intend to keep this simple and clean so as not to distract from gameplay but any time the player pauses for a moment the world should continue to visibly pulse with life.
Combat Animation: this one is critically important. I want every ability, action, and reaction in the game to be distinct, meaty and punchy. Everything should HIT with a nice juicy animation, special effect, subtle motion fidget, sound effect etc. Our combat mechanics are already incredibly dynamic, movement driven and weighty. I want to push the visuals to just POP with this sort of visceral energy on every action.
User Interface: this is probably the single biggest thing holding the game back from hitting that sweet sweet threshold of looking 'professional'. I plan to do a total overhaul on pretty much the whole UI from menus down to the in game HUD. If literally nothing else changed but the UI was drastically improved, I believe this would already elevate the game to stand shoulder to shoulder with any other solid indie game.
Gameplay and Content:
The core of the game is already very solid and we have a, quite frankly, massive pile of content now on the table. That being said there are still enormous improvements to be made here. The key here is going to be consistency of quality and really focusing in on what works well. I feel like its taken me years to figure out how this game is actually supposed to work. Now that I understand this its really just a matter of applying these lessons across all of the games content.
The Bottom 20%: across all of the games content there is a pretty obvious 'bottom 20%' that either doesn't work at all or is just generally kind of lame. This layer is currently significantly dragging down the overall quality of the game. I think its quite difficult and time consuming to take something from 80% to 100% while simply reworking, replacing, or outright removing the worst 'junk' is comparatively straight forward. So my plan here is to do a total rework of the bottom 20% of: level generators, static levels, bosses, monsters, items, talents etc. I want to drastically improve the game by removing or replacing all the bad parts.
Content Holes and Unfinished Systems: now that the bulk of the content is 'on the table' its easy to spot places where we are missing major bosses, minor bosses, monsters, talent upgrades, item types, new classes, new races etc. I plan to be quite strategic here and look for places where new content will have the largest impact. There are also plenty of systems in general that were just 'sketched in' during development and now need to be finalized. As an example: Ranked Mode requires at least a full update pass in order to complete and polish it.
Final Balancing: compared to all the other goals I'd say that balancing is now fairly low priority in terms of how much time I intend to invest in this last year. The rule here will be very similar to the 'Bottom 20%' idea in that I'm looking to fix the really obvious outliers. Items, talents, or upgrades that are either NEVER taken or ALWAYS taken... that should be fixed. Enemies, bosses or levels that are trivially easy or drastically more challenging, that also needs to be fixed.
User Interface: I'm listing this again in this section as UI really effects both the presentation and the gameplay (and the content actually since it reveals to the player what things actually do). There are literally hundreds of places in which the UI can do a better job of communicating to the player what's happening. Its even more challenging because I'd like to streamline everything as much as possible to not only make it readable, but readable at a glance. This will probably also be one of the most time consuming and challenging things for me to do but its critically important so I'm planning on investing a lot of time and effort here.
Conclusion:
Its a lot of work but I'm very excited to see the game finally emerge from the mess of development. I really believe that this year is going to have the biggest impact on the overall quality of the game. Everything already works, everything is already 'good'. Now is the time to make it all GREAT. In terms of time I'm already anticipating that I'll need more than a year to get this to the level I'm aiming for which is fine. I'm more than happy to spend a few extra months (or as long as it takes), to actually give the game the polish and finish I think it deserves. There's something really special hiding beneath all the scaffolding and debris and I intend to find it.
Update 1.33 - The Vault of Yendor 2:
A pretty straightforward update despite how challenging it was to pull off.
Vault of Yendor Tileset:
Literally a complete, bottom up remake of the entire Vault of Yendor tileset. This was the primary goal of this update and I was freaking out a little at the start. I've always struggled with art and I knew that, as the final zone in the game, Vault of Yendor needs to look really spectacular and unique. The first few weeks were just kind of aimless with lots of stuff getting made and thrown away. But about halfway through January things started to click and now I'm quite pleased with how everything has turned out.
The look and feel I'm going for here is that each level in the Vault of Yendor is some sort of giant, over engineered, incomprehensible murder machine. This is Yendors lovingly crafted and curated gallery of deadly madness. Arcane clockwork with a sprinkling of death is basically the look I'm trying to achieve. I've also tried to animate as much of it as possible so that the whole level looks like its doing... whatever it is its supposed to be doing (I've asked Yendor but he just sneers condescendingly).
I still intend to make more passes over this some time this year. I think I've got the clockwork part pretty dialed in but there is a need for more arcane components and effects. Obviously as additional level types get added to Yendor I'll be trying to add more unique machinery and stuff to help make them distinct. Overall though I think this is a pretty massive improvement over what we had before and really helps unify the look of the zone with the lore behind it.
Vault of Yendor Levels:
The artwork took up the bulk of my time but I still tried to get another chunk of levels completed. This update takes us from 48 to 72 unique levels (most of which have some degree of randomization). The goal is to reach at least 100 by the end of development which should be more than enough to guarantee a unique and varied VoY experience for each run.
Tile Blender: invuln and shock tiles rotate around the level forcing the player to rotate along with it while clearing enemies.
Cursed Maze: a large level with multiple groups of undead. The floor is a maze of cursed and non-cursed tiles so kiting and positioning the undead is critical. This is one of those 'break in' levels where careful pulling and pathing can allow you to tackle the groups one by one. Failure to do so results in a mess of a fight.
Maggot Walls: a pure hoard challenge. Lots of maggots with a sprinkling of liches. Drop walls keep blowing and flooding more maggots into the level. My testing indicates that, as expected, the challenge here varies considerably based on player build (as it should).
Cloud Walls: fire and cold variants. Different patterns of flaming/freezing clouds move across the map on a repeating cycle. Player must dodge and slip through the gaps while dealing with the elemental enemies.
Invuln Trail: the player leaves behind a trail of invuln tiles as he moves (max 10). Enemies are mostly melee focused so this is primarily a kiting and positioning challenge.
Turret Waves: player is surrounded by turret hatches with some decent cover. Turrets pop open and closed in groups. The trick here is managing LoS so you are not getting blasted by every turret on every turn.
Balancing:
Just a little bit of stuff I did while continuously testing VoY. Storm Mage in particular just seemed quite lacking and uninteresting compared to every other class.
Shock: Cardinal Spread => All adjacent spread. As a general rule I'm trying to make sure all Tier-III talents are really quite powerful and impactful. Compared to Fire-Nova, Shock was almost never getting nearly the same AoE impact.
Shock (Base): 12DMG => 8DMG and 1Stun => 2Stun. The idea here being to make Shock very explicitly a stun spell. Fire Nova gets to be the big AoE damage ability and Shock gets to be the big AoE crowd control.
Shock (Stun): 2Stun => 3Stun.
Burst-of-Wind: changed so that the player can select the direction of the push. This DRASTICALLY increases the usability of the spell. As a rule I'm quite happy with non damage abilities being slightly OP as I think they take a lot more skill and thought to use than just 'kill thing'.
Conclusion:
That's it for this update. As I said above, its pretty straightforward since like 90% of the work can be summarized as: made VoY look better. I'm finally feeling healthy again and the rest of my family is... mostly... over being sick so I'm excited to get back up to full speed and see what I can do finally do with this project.
Hot Fix:
Whole mess of bug fixes before I move onto the next update. Big thanks to Rethlit for submitting fixes for some of these. Also thank you everyone who continues to send in detailed bug and crash reports!
Monsters:
Clockwork-Armorer and his Clockwork-Shield can now be knocked back normally. Separating them will cause the shield to poof.
Clockwork-Sentry will now stop rotating and spawning Shredders even if enemies are still hidden inside Drop-Walls.
Freezing or immobilizing the Clockwork-Armorer or Clockwork-Shield will now cause them both to stop moving.
Enemies that die and leave oil will not leave it in Flaming-Clouds.
The Torment Status-Effect will now be removed from player if the casting NPC is dominated.
Shadow-Step (Vanish) will now work against Kocha-the-Controller (she justs sits there and will reenter once agroed).
Shadow-Step (Vanish) will now work against Kocha-the-Controllers Golems (previously would not work on first turn after she animates)
Shadow-Step (Vanish): fixed some deeper bugs that were probably causing problems elsewhere as well.
Kocha-The-Controller can now be knocked back as normal.
Arcane-Arrows (and other slow projectiles) will no longer consume SP-Floor as they pass over (they are unaffected by it).
Troll-Necromancer will no longer be able to Raise-Water-Dead through Ice.
Fixed another Soul-Warden crash (I'm aware of at least one more version of this)
Mental-Tether now works on NPCs (if you have dominated the Mind-Bender). This should now work in general for charm, fear etc.
Map and Level:
Fixed incorrect pipe tiles in Vault-of-Yendor (Three-Ring-Circus).
Fixed weirdly rotated bookshelves in Palace-of-Shadow.
Removed some debug tiles on mini-map (pink) that would occasionally show up in certain levels.
Fixed some corner wall tile frames (wrong frame was selected).
Waterfalls will no longer behave like solid objects (can fire over them).
Fixed conveyor belts so they push the player again.
Totems: when mouse over they now correctly shows that their targeting passes through transparent objects (like book shelves).
Misc:
Gaining a rank will now update the Ranked-Menu once you exit your run and return to main menu.
Fixed the text when you win a ranked game and achieve the next rank (was missing a new line)
Staff-of-Force (Ability) will no longer inherit upgrades from Power-Shot (Talent).
Fixed Wand-of-Draining so it only hits Goblet-Shield once (generalized in case we have other multi-tile NPCs).
Wand-of-Draining will not create Lost-Souls on Goblet-Shield.
Staff-of-Lost-Souls will not create Lost-Souls on Goblet-Shield.
Storm-Shot (Damage): changed the symbol from SD => D (from when it used to be Short-Damage).
Charge will now work against a target where the charge ends with the player standing on a conveyor belt
Added desc to Precision (Resistance)
Spring-Sprong-Boots (and Jump) should show the invalid targeting line/target when standing in water.
When you have an ability on your cursor (for placing on hotbar): Right click will drop it.
When you have an ability on your cursor (for placing on hotbar): Closing character menu will drop it.
When you have an ability on your cursor (for placing on hotbar): Clicking anywhere but the ability hotbar will drop it.
Vampire will no longer path to blood (when low hp) when you are auto exploring
Life-Spike can be used on any tile (even if no enemy). Solves problem of not being able to cast on invis or darkness enemies.