Howdy everyone! It's been a hot minute at this point, with 0.6.0 landing over a month after when I wanted it to come out. I really wanted to hit the mark of "end of May" but sadly the discipline and motivation to keep the hobby alive after work has been a bit harder as of late. That said, it's finally here and it's extremely cool!
Background and Context
From the beginning, I wanted RogueFlip to be a simple game. But as ideas started coming to me, I knew I couldn't just leave The Elementalist as the only way to play the game. A friend mentioned an idea around a year ago of "What if there was some sort of combo meter so the better you solve the puzzle the more points you get?" and that turned into a whole multi-character system that starts with this one: The Adept.
While I was making The Adept, I realized that I wanted to finally remove some of the frustrating RNG from The Elementalist's core mechanics, notably that you may not achieve your deck's full potential without a full clear. This led to the idea that if you have a cool deck, you get cool bonuses, which matched perfectly with the theme to have The Adept be "cool run building" and The Elementalist be "cool deck building".
Along the way, I wanted to solve a couple more of the game's core problems, both really focused around the experience in the Shop. Most notably was the fact that scaling Gold income has always felt required in order to enjoy the game, and thus Earth builds dominated the game since it first hit playtester's hands. But what if, instead, the game provided you a bit more gold as a baseline, making further income bumps not nearly as impactful, and also made the Shop have consistent pricing across each item? This ended up feeling way better than I thought it would, and it means you can put together really fun runs even without investing too heavily in economy. Similarly, it felt frustrating to deal with the "shop locking" problem, where you either set it to auto-unlock and you forget to lock it again or you leave that setting off and forget to unlock it. Instead, you can just freeze item-by-item now, further tuning the shop to help you get exactly what you want.
I really, truly hope that you all give the update a try and let me know what you think! I also want to provide a massive shout-out to the playtesters that really helped make this update be as good as possible (notably Sonicbannane, Kabbyyss, and NullHazel) as without them, this update would be so much more of a mess. I still expect tons of balance tweaks to be needed, but I'm also hoping that it's in a really good spot and D10 still feels difficult yet fun. Make sure you check out the Discord to leave feedback, show off your sick runs, and let me know your thoughts!
What's Next?
Now, it's onto 0.7.0 and beyond! First things first: I need to get a better handle on testing. Too many bugs are slipping through the cracks and balance changes are getting more and more difficult to predict. So I'm taking some time to really build out an engine that will allow me to simulate "real games" to help gather data and protect the game against nasty outliers.
But once that's done? Well, the #1 thing the game is missing right now is more content; most notably it's missing more interesting Stickers and Trinkets to help fill things out. Right now, most runs just end up with most of the trinkets in the game and you're really focusing in on the same handful of "the strongest" Stickers. I want to add more variety and spice to each run, allowing more room for complexity and interesting design spaces. I've avoided too much complexity thus far (mostly to make my programming life easier) but I feel like the game could live with some more exciting effects.
Of specific note, I've decided against putting Consumables in the game, at least for now. I think the game does not need that level of complexity, and I don't think I can truly do it justice without having "too good to use syndrome" pop up again.
The other punch list of items currently queued for 0.7.0:
Profile Statistics - Track fun stats across all your runs such as runs won/lost, difficulty unlocked, cards flipped, bombs detonated, runs lost to hp, runs lost to score, and much more! Building out the base module will allow me to add more and more cool stats over time.
Leaderboards - Once we have profile-level statistics... Why not have a leaderboard?? Who has the highest score on Difficulty 10? What about the longest win streak? Have your name in lights (with the ability to opt-out, of course!) highlighting how good YOU have become at RogueFlip
More Card Markings - Right now, the only thing you can do to cards is mark em yellow or red. But this really doesn't help late game because the math gets too hard and sometimes it'd be nice if you could just draw on the screen. While I don't know exactly how this will manifest, I certainly want more than two markings for cards and I really really want the ability to draw on the screen
Quality of Life - There's a bunch of ideas here, but the two big ones are:
Viewing the board after your run completes so you can grab that sweet shareable screenshot.
A breakdown at the end of each round of what all happened, including what gave you gold, what gave you HP, what cards contributed to points, and so on.
My current goal is to have 0.7.0 out sometime in September, but it all depends on how real life agrees with me. If I can turn the work stress down and really get down to pushing RogueFlip forward again, it's more than possible. I can't wait to share more with you as time goes by, and The Demolitionist and 0.8.0 is just around the corner!
But without further ado, check out the 0.6.0 patch notes!
v0.6.0 - Major Content Update (New Character: The Adept)
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 of this new content.
New Character: The Adept
Master the power of Combo to build powerful multipliers and gain XP from flipping high-powered cards to level-up and build a run unlike any other!
Adept has a new Combo mechanic! Each card flipped gives 1 Combo, and each Combo gives an additional 1.01x multiplier to all card flips. But watch out! Detonating a bomb will remove 20 Combo if its entire damage wasn't blocked, and all Combo is removed at the end of each round.
Adept has a new XP mechanic! Each card flipped or reflipped gives its base, unmodified value as XP. Gaining enough XP will allow the Adept to level-up at the end of the round, gaining powerful bonuses such as gold, max HP, income, or even free card flips each round, and these bonuses stack over the course of a run.
Added 14 new Trinkets that are only available while playing The Adept.
Added 3 new Stickers that are only available while playing The Adept.
Added 1 new Upgrade that are only available while playing The Adept. (This one can be applied to bombs!)
Major Balance Changes
Gold and Income Rebalance
A major problem the game has had for quite some time now is just how incredibly good income is and how incentivized you are you stack as much of it as you can get. Given that only the Elementalist existed up until this point, this generally meant that every run, especially at higher difficulties, required you to build up Earth initially in order to be able to afford the opportunity for your run to pop off.
While it's not necessarily terrible balance to require some investment in economy to be able to have a successful run, when I was designing the Adept I didn't want her to have a similar easily-accessible scaling income modifier, opting instead for the more random grab-bag of XP bonuses. This meant that without an overall rebalance of Income and Gold, the Adept will never reach the same heights that an Elementalist with an Earth-focused build could attain.
As such, the following changes have been made to make runs less reliant on getting as much income as possible and decrease the relative value of a single +1 income bonus while still leaving enough room that economy-focused builds can still gain that edge in how powerful they can become if the puzzle pieces can come together. Combined with changes to the Elementalist, my hope is this creates a more balanced experience between different archetypes and finally reigns in economy-focused builds' supreme reign over the game.
Starting income increased from 7 to 12.
Difficulty 6 still reduces starting income by 2, meaning it has doubled from 5 -> 10
+1 income is gained automatically 4 times per run, before rounds 3, 8, 13, and 18.
Difficulty 8 has been changed to no longer add more character-related difficulty and instead delays the round in which the income bonuses and free rerolls are gained by 1 round.
This means every run will hit 16 income in round 18 (less and later at higher difficulties)
Shop items (Upgrades, Stickers, and Trinkets) have had a few cost-related changes:
Items no longer cost more at higher rarities. Their cost is now colored White, Blue, or Yellow based on rarity.
This originally was different to mimic similar games that make rarer items cost more, but at no point in RogueFlip's balance has it felt "good" for a rare Trinket to cost nearly double what a common Trinket does.
Upgrades now cost 4 gold each (from 2/3/5), Stickers cost 6 gold each (from 4/6/9), and Trinkets cost 10 gold each (from 7/9/12)
The goal of this change is to make it where below difficulty 6, your starting income allows you to buy 3 Upgrades, 2 Stickers, or 1 Trinket, and also ensure that Difficulty 6 doesn't make it so you suddenly can no longer buy Trinkets
The Elementalist no longer gains scaling income from Earth bonuses (see Elementalist rebalance for more)
Some items that give one-time Gold bonuses now generally give more Gold, with some tweaks to reduce access to scaling Gold income:
Slot Machine now gives -2/+3 -> -3/+6 Gold
Gravity Boots now gives +3 -> +5 Gold if no bombs were detonated
Bore Drill no longer has Earth cards gain +1 Gold if adjacent to 2 Earth cards or +1 Gold income if adjacent to 3+ Earth cards. Instead, it now has Earth cards gain +1 Gold per adjacent Earth card.
Elementalist Bonus Rework
The Elementalist has had two major problems with its balance, especially with the inception of Scaling Difficulty:
Income being super important (see Gold and Income Rebalance) meant that Earth's scaling income bonus was head and shoulders above all other options and thus getting to 7 Earth cards (and making sure you flipped all 7 every round) was the primary focus for all Elementalist runs before building the rest of the run.
Bonuses were derived based on how many cards of that element you flipped, which meant that you could build a great deck but couldn't necessarily utilize your bonuses unless you pushed your luck through bombs to get the bonus you care about. This usually meant you had to over-build your element so you had some extra cards just in case.
While I'm very comfortable with the original design of The Elementalist, the rest of the game has gone away from bonuses that are reliant on the order in which things are flipped and is pushing for less RNG and more control over each run. As such, the following changes have been made to make the Elementalist more focused on building your deck rather than being perfect at flipping (that's what the Adept is for).
Element bonuses are now static based on how many cards of that element are in your deck, rather than gaining a bonus when you flip a certain number of cards of that element.
The patch notes do not contain the full list of bonuses as they have all changed and would be a bit of information overload. In general, the themes you're used to with the elements has remained the same.
Supercharger has been moved from Common -> Uncommon rarity as it's much more powerful now
All 4 elements have some way of generating Gold that are thematically linked with that element. For example, Heat can gain Gold based on demolishing the score threshold, or Life can gain gold when you heal.
Each element now also has a "Dominant" bonus that is only granted if that element has the most number of cards in your deck. Only one Dominant bonus may be active at once, so having two or more elements tied for the most disables all Dominant bonuses. These bonuses are generally synergistic with one or more other bonuses that element offers.
All elements are standardized on needing 4, 8, and 12 cards in your deck to activate their bonuses, and the goal is for each tier to have a consistent them: 4 = simple and globally beneficial, 8 = gold-generating, and 12 = unique and powerful.
Difficulty 2 now replaces a 1 of the "opposite" element rather than of the selected element. This is Earth for Candle, Life for Lightbulb, Heat for Rock, and Light for Heart.
Difficulty 4 now increases the bonus threshold by 2 cards for tiers 2 and 3.
In order to give more starting identity to each run, the 4 starting Trinkets for Elementalist have been modified. They previously gave cards of their matching element +2 points. The new effects are:
Candle - Heat cards give +1 point, and an additional +1 point for every 10 Heat cards in your deck.
Heart - Round Start -> Gain score equal to 50% of Max HP
Lightbulb - When a card is flipped by an effect (not the player), it gives +1 point. This bonus is increased by +1 point if this flip was a re-flip.
Rock - On Gold Gain -> Gain an equal amount of Score
Improvements/Changes
The Monoculture Trinket, Supercharger Sticker, and Rainbow Upgrade have been made available to the Demo version of the game! As The Adept gets released, a few things got simpler by keeping all things related to The Elementalist available in the Demo.
Added a setting for "Include Bombs in Grid Counters" that defaults to on (current behavior) but can be toggled off if having bombs counted in the green grid counters is undesired.
Added a notification when the Score Threshold is reached (can be toggled off in the Settings) and made the Score change to a light blue color if the score is above the score threshold. This should help alleviate issues of continuing to flip after the score threshold and losing to bomb detonations.
The Shop no longer has a Lock/Unlock function. Instead, each individual item in the shop can be Frozen, ensuring it persists across rerolls, and does not automatically unfreeze. This should remove the frustration with shop locking and enable more fine-tuning of your shop strategy!
Removed the "Remove Card" and "Decrement by 1" Card Upgrades. Card removal proved to be obsolete after the changes to make the grid auto-scale, and Decrement by 1 just simply doesn't get used. Its goal was to help synergize on single-number builds, but that's not shaking out in reality. Instead, these two polluted the Card Upgrade pool making it harder to get the upgrades players cared about.
Added a check when starting the game to see if a saved run can actually be loaded. If it's broken, a dialog will pop up alerting the player and letting them know where the save directory is to back it up before starting a new run, if desired.
Added a "keywords" section to the How to Play menu. Currently it only contains 4 keywords (Block, Defuse, Detonate, and Re-flip) but will be added to over time as needed.
Bug Fixes
Fixed an issue where Bore Drill was only ever giving 1 gold and 1 gold income as opposed to giving based on the specified thresholds.
Fixed an issue where Fountain was giving 3x healing instead of 2x.
Fixed an issue where Mighty One was giving 1 less bonus point than expected in most cases, which also incorrectly allowed it to give -1 points.
Fixed an issue where Hospital was only ever giving a flat 1 hp and/or 1 max hp rather than the proper amount calculated from number of Life cards.
Fixed an issue where the Adept's level-up bonus to gain Block on round start was incorrectly giving 2 block regardless of how many times the bonus had been selected.
Fixed an issue where Soda's tooltip would display negative points after 12 rounds. This was purely a display issue, it never went below 0 score in calculations.
Fixed an issue where Plasma Gun and Tally Clicker were not giving their scaling mult, only their initial starting mult.
Fixed a number of issues where the game's state being saved was happening in the background, but colliding with actions in the game, causing various inconsistencies or crashes. This, most notably, affected Stock Market not removing gold on round start, but also impacted many other parts of the game in subtle ways.