Howdy everyone, it's time for the first major content update for RogueFlip's Early Access! The patch notes below are pretty darn chunky so I'll give a quick bit of background and a brief synopsis of what's changed.
Of note, I previously wanted to get some of the major gameplay changes into 0.4.2, but I decided that they needed much more thought and testing and it felt wrong to so massively change how the game feels to play in a patch release, so I held it back until Scaling Difficulty was ready so it could all go out together in 0.5.0.
Update Background and Summary
First off, thank you to everyone who has picked up the game, left reviews, and joined the Discord to provide feedback! One of the most vital pieces of feedback I wanted to address was this: For a skill-based roguelike, it really sucks to constantly lose to bad RNG. While randomization is one of the key tenets of the genre, it should only impact the game as much as it needs to to make it interesting, but should not determine whether most runs win or lose. The second big piece of feedback is that everyone that plays the game has a different vibe they're searching for, either cozy and relaxing and fun to watch builds pop off or wanting something where skill and "doing the math" pays off in a big way, but with the game being balanced around a single set of bombs and score thresholds, it was a constant struggle between "too easy" and "too hard"
My hope is that 0.5.0 addresses both of those core pieces of feedback: Reduce RNG and improve player agency, including Scaling Difficulty so you have goals to strive for but can back down to an easy difficulty and just blast the game with a fun build.
Previously, I felt RogueFlip had 4 main RNG-related problems that could absolutely ruin your run with no warning:
Right-Sized Deck Problem - If you take every card reward, your deck will be too big most rounds, but if you skip some card rewards, you end up with holes in the grid that could be filled with more points. This meant that you were incentivized to take every card, leaving you in a situation where your best card could just... not end up in the grid, which could easily be 100+ points left behind.
Order of Operations Problem - With Stickers like Compass and Deck Box or Trinkets like Bore Drill or Hospital focused on the order in which cards are flipped to maximize score bonus, but the player having virtually no control over this order, you could have wild swings from round-to-round based on whether your best card was flipped first or last in a given round.
Early Bad Shop Problem - The game is intentionally balanced for you to get stronger through good Shop decisions, but if your first couple of shops give you nothing synergistic to stay alive, you can just lose a run in an early round through no fault of your own, and rerolls were too expensive to use as a mechanic to avoid early bad RNG.
Mandatory Full Clear and Dying to Bombs - Full clear previously nearly doubled your Gold income which made it feel virtually mandatory and nearly all stages of the game, especially early on. This led to essentially forcing players to gamble on 50/50s with bombs, taking damage, and ruining runs early on all because of how vital income is.
Well, all 4 of these have hopefully been solved in 0.5.0! You should check out the full patch notes below, but in short: your grid grows to meet the size of your deck instead of growing at fixed intervals, many game elements have been rebalanced to care about what's in your deck instead of what's visible, you are now guaranteed to start with free rerolls and gain more over the course of a run, and Full Clear now gives Score instead of Gold.
Based on playtesting, the reception has been extremely positive to these changes and I think enough tuning has been done to finally get 0.5.0 out into the wild for everyone else to enjoy! I sincerely hope that between these changes and the new Scaling Difficulty mechanic that more people can enjoy RogueFlip and feel less distraught by bad RNG!
Looking Ahead
So what's next? Well 0.5.0 still has a couple gameplay issues I'd like to correct. Most notably there's not enough payoffs for stacking things like gold income or max hp or healing, and I also believe the Elementalist's Element Bonuses should likely be static bonuses based on deck size rather than flip threshold bonuses, to create a more consistent and predictable gameplay. I expect to be addressing both of these in 0.6.0.
But what's 0.6.0's main focus going to be? Well, it's time to add a second character: The Adept! She's going to be themed around building Combo by flipping cards without flipping bombs, which will give a stacking score bonus to every card you flip! But how will she match the awesome scaling bonuses of the Elementalist? Well that you'll have to wait to find out!
In addition, the game is still lacking content. Point blank, I still want to add a wealth of new Trinkets and Stickers, but obviously the focus for 0.6.0 will be adding content to support the Adept's skills. But I do really hope that I can get some more generic payoffs for stacking things besides score into the game at the same time. 0.5.0 really didn't add Stickers or Trinket so 0.6.0 really needs to add a lot!
I'm really excited to continue working on RogueFlip and will, as always, be closely monitoring community feedback to make the game as good as possible!
Without further ado, the patch notes for 0.5.0:
v0.5.0 - Scaling Difficulty and Major Gameplay Changes
Please Note: Saved runs from prior versions will not work with this update.
New Content
Please note that all new Stickers, Trinkets, Upgrades, and Characters are only available in the full Early Access version of RogueFlip. The Demo version will not receive any content from those categories.
Added 1 new Uncommon Trinket (Stock Market)
Added Scaling Difficulty mechanic. See the Scaling Difficulty section below for more details.
Traditionally content updates (the 2nd number in the version) will contain more new Trinkets, Stickers, and Upgrades than this. However, difficulty and RNG have continued to be the most pressing problems with the game, and so I decided to get 0.5.0 done without locking it behind more new content.
Scaling Difficulty
In order to allow for more skill levels and styles to enjoy RogueFlip, the game now includes Scaling Difficulty. This is very similar to mechanics found in other games of the genre, such as Slay the Spire's "Ascension" mechanic.
During Character Selection, a new option exists to increase the difficulty of your run.
All players will start at Difficulty 0 and winning a run will unlock the next tier of Difficulty, up to the maximum of 10. This unlock persists to your new Profile (which will be expanded greatly in future updates) and will sync via Steam Cloud to other devices.
Each Difficulty level contains a modifier to make your run harder and stacks with every previous Difficulty level, meaning Difficulty 10 (or D10 for short) includes all previous Difficulty levels' modifiers.
Now that difficulty can be tailored to your preferred experience, the base difficulty of the game (D0) has been made significantly easier:
Base Max HP increased 10 -> 12
Base Gold income increased 4 -> 7 (see Major Gameplay Changes section on the loss of Full Clear bonus Gold)
New Bombs that get added throughout the run have been lowered from 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 4, 4, 4 -> 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 3
Decks now start with 1 fewer value 1 Bomb. Instead, a card is added after Character Selection. Currently for Elementalist, this means a 1 matching the Element of your selected starting Trinket will be added to fill out the initial 25-card deck.
Elementalist's 12 flip Element Bonuses now only require 10 flips
Score thresholds have been lowered across the board
However, all of this difficulty (and more) can be added back in via the 10 levels of Difficulty. Ideally, somewhere around D6-D7 should feel similar in difficulty to current 0.4.1, with D10 feeling slightly more difficult than 0.4.0 was:
Score thresholds are increased
Replace a random 1 in the starting deck with a value 3 Bomb
Max HP reduced to 10
Elementalist: Element Bonuses that require 10 flips now require 12
Score thresholds are increased
Gold income reduced to 5
Increase the value of bombs added to your deck during a run by 1
Elementalist: All element bonuses require 1 additional flip
Bombs are added 1 round sooner, and 1 additional value 5 Bomb is added in Round 20
Score thresholds are increased
The goal of this new system is that new players do not get turned away by the current high difficulty of the game, but experienced players can move past lower Difficulties once they become too easy.
Traditionally, these Difficulty levels are per-Character, such as in Slay the Spire or Balatro. I'm not positive right now if I will apply that same pattern here or if Difficulty unlocks will be across all Characters. That's a problem for a future update!
The balance is almost certainly going to be off on this initial patch, so I'll be closely monitoring feedback and metrics and adjusting accordingly!
Major Gameplay Changes
This patch brings with it 4 major systems changes aimed at increasing player agency and reducing the likelihood that a run loses simply due to bad RNG. These changes might turn out to be in the wrong direction, but part of Early Access is to experiment and find what's right for the game before locking it in for 1.0. Any and all feedback about these changes will be heard, but please play it for yourself before judging the changes.
The grid now scales to the size of your deck, ensuring your entire deck will always be present in the grid
The only exception is there is a technical limitation of an 8x8 grid, but getting 64 cards is extremely difficult and unlikely so this will likely never be a problem anyway.
In addition, bombs are more spread throughout the rounds instead of being added in big chunks, with bombs being added in rounds 3, 6, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, and 19.
Score thresholds have been adjusted to have a smoother progression and reach a higher peak in Round 20 given that more cards can be available in the grid
The goal of this change is to remove one of the worst RNG offenders: when your best Card isn't present in the grid. Ninja and Trick Deck were sort of band-aids on the problem, but it didn't help the majority of runs.
This does mean that many rounds may have holes in the grid since the grid will scale by an entire column or row at once, and I will be monitoring this feedback to see if players do not like it.
See the Balance section for reworked Ninja and Trick Deck
The order you flip cards in the grid now has a much less significant impact on your score
For me, personally, this was the single most annoying way to lose a run. Imagine getting one insanely good card with both Deck Box and Compass on it, how cool! You flip it near the end of a round, and it gives you over 200 points in a single card! "This is a surefire winning run" you might think. Well, next round, RNG decides it's not your time, and it's the first card you flip, neither sticker does anything, and you fail to hit the score threshold even though you had a perfect card to win the run. This isn't a hypothetical, it literally happened to me while streaming earlier today.
This mostly has to do with effects that take effect immediately but care about other cards already being visible, like Deck Box, Compass, Roots, and even Trinkets like Bore Drill and Hospital.
Any effect that falls into this category has been reworked or at least tweaked (see the Balance section). There's 4 main categories of changes here:
Effects that care about other visible cards (e.g. Deck Box, Compass) now care about the cards in your Deck and have lower numbers to compensate
Effects that re-flip other cards (e.g. Roots, Laser) now hold onto their re-flips if there's no valid targets until more cards are flipped, at which point they will execute those re-flips
Effects that cared about adjacent cards (e.g. Bore Drill, Hospital) now trigger on round end.
The 3 Element Bonus 12-card effects that gave massive point bonuses (Heat, Life, and Earth) now give their bonus directly to Score. Heat's two smaller bonuses will stay as-is.
Full Clear no longer gives bonus Gold
Instead, it now gives Score equal to 10% (rounded down) of the current Score Threshold.
Base Gold Income has been raised from 4 -> 7 to compensate, and Cash Register has been changed (see Balance section)
This change has many goals, but the 2 primary goals are: Reducing the impact of bad RNG by ensuring everyone gets similar base gold income, and helping to ensure that players who always take the risk and go for full clears are less likely to miss the Score Threshold than they were before.
One of the most common complaints about the game is that it feels bad to full clear every board but lose to Score. While I don't currently intend to make it impossible to lose if you're good at the puzzle aspect of the game, I do think this change helps close that gap slightly.
By removing the economic incentive (that always felt mandatory) and replacing it by a score incentive (that becomes optional if you've already met the threshold), and combined with the change to allow players to more easily see what cards remain unflipped, the hope is that full clearing feels good because you flipped all your cards and helped you not lose to score, but doesn't immediately put you ahead of the curve economically.
I will be closely monitoring the balance of Bombs after this change because it may warrant raising the stakes for gambling on full clears.
Shop rerolling starts cheaper, scales over the course of the run, and doles out free rerolls periodically
Each run now starts with 3 free rerolls and gets 1 additional free reroll in rounds 4, 8, 12, and 16
Reroll cost now starts at 2 in round 1 and increments by 1 in rounds 4, 8, 12, and 16, meaning rerolls from rounds 16-20 cost 6 Gold.
This change is aimed at increasing player agency and reducing RNG in the Shop early on by encouraging rerolling away bad shops, while clamping down slightly on runaway economy builds maxing out their entire deck late game.
Improvements/Changes
Added a How to Play button to the in-game menu so you no longer have to exit to the Main Menu to access the How to Play information.
When the Shop is locked, the button will now be Yellow to make it more obvious at a glance that it's locked. Unlocked Shop remains white.
Added 2 hotkeys: Escape closes most active dialogs or opens the menu if no dialogs are open; and Space ends the current round. These are not currently remappable
Added a new option (off by default): "Automatically End Round on Full Clear", which will make it to where you are no longer required to click End Round after a Full Clear (since there's no more player actions you can take anyway)
Added a new option (on by default): "Automatically Unlock Shop on Enter", which will unlock the shop when you enter it if it's locked. This helps prevent accidentally leaving the shop locked after buying the one item you had left it locked for.
Added a button below the grid to clear all Card flags which will remove all the yellow/red markings on all cards. This also has a hotkey of Delete (not Backspace).
Added a toggle to the Deck Display dialog for "Hide Flipped Cards". This is valuable information that you could previously do yourself but why not remove the mental burden, there's enough math already!
The Deck Display dialog now saves your Grouping and Hide Flipped Cards selection so next time you open it, it will default to what you previously had selected
The Deck Display dialog now only scrolls the section where your deck is, leaving the important information and controls anchored above the deck so you don't have to scroll to see it with large deck sizes
Updated all verbiage about "flipping a bomb that won't detonate" to instead use the keyword "Defuse"
On the Run End Dialog, changed "New Run" to take you back to the Character Select screen (mostly so you can change difficulty after you win) and added a Restart button which does what New Run used to do: kick off a new run with the same Character, Trinket, and Difficulty.
Bug Fixes
Fixed Hoard's description to say "score" instead of "points" since points refers to the points each card gives but Score is the round score.
Fixed a handful of Score vs Points verbiage usages. Points should be specific to a single card's score calculations, and Score should be for non-card Score changes
Fixed a handful of Gain vs Give verbiage usages. Give should be specific to points on a specific card, and Gain should be for all other resources (such as Gold or Block).
Fixed an issue where Net, Palette, and Laser were giving 2x mult instead of 1.5x like the description says.
Fixed a crash that could occur on ending a round while card flips were still happening
Fixed an issue where the Duplicate upgrade would not copy the Factorial upgrade of the copied card
Fixed an issue where Deck Box was not properly adding its mult to 1, meaning it could actually multiply the card by less than 1, reducing score
Fixed an issue where two cards, each with Eye, could hit an infinite loop re-flipping each other
Balance
Trinkets
Bore Drill: No longer gives bonuses on flip. Now does "Round End -> For each Earth card, if adjacent to 2 Earth cards: gain +1 Gold; if adjacent to 3+ Earth cards: gain +1 Gold Income"
Cash Register: No longer doubles Full Clear bonus. It now instead gives +2 Gold Income. Additionally, Rarity changed Rare -> Common
Chaos: Minimum mult changed 0.5x -> 0.75x
Fountain: Now just doubles all healing, no chance involved.
Hospital: No longer gives bonuses on flip. Now does "Round End -> For each Life card, if adjacent to 2 Life cards: Heal 1 HP; if adjacent to 3+ Life cards: Gain 1 Max HP"
Mighty One: No longer gives 1's points based on visible 1's. Now 1's give 1 additional point for every 2 1's in your deck.
Plasma Gun: No longer gives points based on adjacent Heat cards and no longer gains a permanent bonus when adjacent to multiple Heat cards. Now does "Heat cards give 1.05x points. Round End -> For each Heat card that is adjacent to 2+ Heat cards, this effect is permanently increased by 0.05x."
Rabbit's Foot: Rarity changed Common -> Uncommon
This is how it was meant to be, and it was a mistake for it to be Common
Sea Urchin: No longer gives +1 point to odd value cards.
Ship: Chance to re-flip per visible prime number decreased 10% -> 3%
Trick Deck: No longer prioritizes deck by most stickers and highest value during grid generation. It now instead does "At grid generation time, if there is at least 1 hole in the grid, adds a randomly-generated card to the grid". Cards added this way are considered "temporary" and will be slightly transparent and note their Temporary nature in their tooltip.
Stickers
Compass: No longer gives points based on visible cards. Now gives +1 Point for every 3 cards in your deck (excluding this card) that share this card's value.
Deck Box: No longer gives mult based on visible cards. Now gives 1.1x for each card in your deck (excluding this card) that share this card's value.
Eye: No longer re-flips adjacent 1's when they are flipped. Now immediately flips adjacent 1's, then re-flips them with 2x bonus mult.
Fist: No longer gives points based on the lowest visible card. Now gives points equal to the highest value card in your deck
Infinity: No longer gives points based on visible cards. Now gives +1 point for each unique card value in your deck.
Laser: If no visible cards, will now re-flip next flipped card.
Ninja: No longer guarantees to be in the grid or gives bonus points based on cards not in grid. It now instead does "On Round Start -> Flip this card, it gives 0.5x points"
Roots: If not enough visible cards, will now re-flip next flipped cards until enough have been re-flipped
Seed: Now additionally has "If the card's value is a 9, this sticker is replaced with a Tree."
Soda: Now starts at 10 -> 12 points before decrementing. No longer decrements on each trigger, instead decrementing on Round End.
YinYang: Now has a 50% chance to give 8 -> 10 points
Element Bonuses
Heat (12): Threshold lowered 12 -> 10. No longer gives points to the flipped card. Now gains Score equal to the sum of all visible Heat cards.
Life (12): Threshold lowered 12 -> 10. No longer gives points to the flipped card. Now gains Score equal to Max HP.
Earth (12): Threshold lowered 12 -> 10. No longer gives multiplier to the flipped card. Now gains Score equal to 2x Gold Income
Other
Gaining Max HP now heals for the same amount
This was previously an intentional design decision but very consistent player feedback about this being both confusing and underpowered has led to deciding to change it for the better.