Greetings All!
We’re back with another quick update on our road to releasing v1.0 of Rogue Legacy 2. Even though it’s been nearly three months since the last roadmap update, the previous post was shortly followed by the Winter Gifts Event, then a company-wide break for the holidays. That means we’ve only had a month to work on wrapping up the game, but even in this short time we’ve made great progress! From fleshing out the end sequence, to moving full steam ahead with translation work, we’re still on-track for a Q2 2022 release.
We’re actually keeping our fingers crossed that this will be the final interim update, with our next post announcing the official release date!
ENDING SEQUENCE – Even when writing the initial Road to Release update, we didn’t fully know how much was going to be crammed into the ending. Turns out it’s a whoooole lot. In fact, it’s become so long that it’s virtually a full content update worth of work. But don’t worry, we don’t mean long as in a 30-minute cutscene. The ending is anything but passive, as we want players to be fully engaged from their first steps on Charon’s boat, to the final scroll of the game’s credits. The ending sequence currently can be played from start to finish, we’re just running through it a second time and polishing each section as we go. We are confident Rogue Legacy 2 will offer gamers a rewarding end to their epic journey.
FINAL BOSS – Our last roadmap entry listed approximately 9 steps (we’re forgot audio so it’s actually 10 steps) to create a single boss in Rogue Legacy 2. Huge strides have been made on the final boss, as we’re currently sitting on step 8. The final adversary is feeling good, but we want to push it to greatness, so we’re balancing the moveset and improving the visuals to make it truly memorable. We’re probably higher than the stated 60% on the roadmap, but we want to stay conservative.
STORY – The final story has been completed, and is going through several revisions to ensure it answers all the questions posed throughout the adventure. Some side-stories have also changed to better suit how we wanted to conclude the tale.
LOCALIZATION BACKEND – No real changes here as language integration has gone smoothly. Almost too smoothly. But we won’t overthink it and just take it as it is: a minor blessing in what’s been a long and arduous development process.
LOC TESTING TOOLS – We recently added a host of tools to make testing languages easier in Rogue Legacy 2. This is absolutely vital for RL2, as it has so much content that it’s possible to not come across some scenarios even after playing for hundreds of hours. We’ve put a lot of work into this, and it is now easier to test RL2 than any of our previous (and inarguably smaller) games.
TRANSLATIONS – As mentioned earlier, translation work is moving full steam ahead with RL2 being translated into 10 different languages. The current list is French, German, Russian, Italian, Spanish (Spain), Brazilian Portuguese, Turkish, Korean, and Chinese Simplified and Traditional. While this is the complete list for version 1.0, we’ll always consider additional languages for the future.
ADDITIONAL CONTENT – Some major content additions have been completed, such as the final Skill Tree and the Biome-altering Burdens. It’s tough to talk about this without going into detail though, so let’s just say we’re still chipping away.
OPTIMIZATION – Quite a bit of work has been done on the optimization side of the game. The reason why the number is sitting at a paltry 35% is because optimization always comes in two parts: identifying the bottlenecks and implementing a solution. After months of minor improvements here and there, we’ve managed to pinpoint some major blockers that we believe will give meaningful performance back once fixed. The bottlenecks have been identified, and all that’s left is to execute. Progress on optimization is really exciting to us, because performance is one of the things we always felt we could do better.
WHAT’S NEXT? – We know what you’re thinking: still no release date? Game development is more an art than a science, which makes it very difficult to gauge what’s going to happen even a few weeks out. Even in this short month we’ve run into our fair share of hiccups, so we want to be extra sure that everything is ready before we make a peep about launch day. The good news is a lot of progress is being made, and for us each day is more exciting than the last. Even if you’ve done everything there is to do in the Dragon’s Vow, there’s still a ton to look forward to in v1.0.
Lastly, here's a second song for the Tower biome coming for the final release:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_BQ4iI8K9Y
See you in the next update!