After 1.5y in Early Access and 6.5y of development: Rogue Command is done.
Martin and me (Mario) just pushed the button and released Rogue Command - our first game - onto Steam as a fully grown, no longer Early Access, game.
Even with the 1.0 we are not quite done with it yet, there is some more cool stuff coming down the line.
But: it is now the game we wanted to make, at the level of quality we wanted to achieve. And it has an awesome new trailer:
When we set out we wanted to make a singleplayer RTS game that allows you to have the feeling of discovery when coming up with creative builds that we had learned to love from games like Slay the Spire and Monster Train.
But we wanted it to feel right. Like a real RTS game, one of the ones we grew up with. We love auto-battlers and tower defense and all the cool little sub genres that have spun off. But we wanted to have you control your units, build your bases and manage an economy. We wanted it to play like StarCraft or Command & Conquer Generals.
Throughout all of development these two guiding ideas were the basis for every decision.
a great feeling RTS
with a huge variety of crazy builds
And we actually pulled it off! We have thousands and thousands of players and many of them have played it for dozens or hundreds of hours.
And even though this is an insane game to tackle as a duo, we managed to make a game that (as of writing this) sits very comfortably at 91% positive reviews. That is fricking nuts.
When I was writing a press release about our 1.0, I had this thought that, if we could show this to our teenage selves, this probably would have been their favorite game. And while the game is far from perfect, I think that is really the case.
We worked really hard to get here. But a big part of why the game has turned out as well as it has, is because it found its community.
From the demo release early 2022 (I had to double check this for a second and then take a deep breath...) there were those of you who saw something cool in our game. And then took time out of their lives to share your thoughts with us. I am sure here and there things slipped through the cracks, but we really tried to read everything. And then we tried to synthesize this feedback with our guiding ideas and find solutions that stayed true to both the intention of the feedback and our vision.
Oh... and then there were of course hundreds and hundreds of tiny to small to gamebreaking bugs, that you helped us track down and fix.
If you have ever taken the time to share your feedback with us, either here on the Steam Forums, in a video or our discord: thank you. It meant so much.
The 1.0 we rolled out today is coming with awesome new content.
5 new Ascensions: 11 to 15 are introducing a bunch of new enemy units and variants and most importantly 5 new bosses, including the final boss right at the heart of the PCX threat.
The Castle: our new turret specialist. An incredibly powerful defensive structure in its own right, it also allows you to rain down destruction all across the map with its powerful global active ability. If you ever thought Rogue Command could support a turtle playstyle better, I think you are going to have a lot of fun with this!
As hinted in the intro, there is more coming for Rogue Command in the future.
more specialists
more enemy variants
We'll use the influx of new players to get more feedback and data on balancing.
We will continue to eliminate as many bugs as we can.
That's what we know for sure and the folder of ideas is filled to the brim, so let's see where the journey takes us.
On most days it felt very natural and incredibly fun to be present in the community for me. Sometimes it was hard not to get shaken by a harsh (and worse correct) bit of feedback when a day was already tough. And there were some very very tough days.
I was not sure, if I should include this part here, but to me it is very ingrained in how the game came to be.
The pandemic shattered our workflows at a time where the two of us just had gotten into the groove. It was weird and scary and psychologically challenging. And it made being a parent a lot harder, something I talked about a lot with my mother.
And right in the thick of that situation she got the news that she probably had cancer (that is why track 30 on the Soundtrack DLC is called "waiting for that call").
Then the possibility became a certainty. She got treatment and got better for a while. A year of normalcy the amazing modern medicine bought us against the odds.
But then the cancer came back. Our visits and calls became shorter, because she no longer had the strength. And then the summer before the game went into Early Access, she passed away.
She never played games herself, but she was always curious when I was still living at home, instead of judging them. And incredibly supportive when I started to work on a game myself. She always asked about the state of the game, asked if another youtuber had made a video and listened to me talking about game design hot takes for hours. I miss her everyday.
And not long before my mother passed another very close family member received a devastating cancer diagnosis. A fight that is still ongoing and weighing on me, even as I am trying to get hyped for our full release here.
So if you took the time to say something nice (or something tough, but in a nice tone) throughout the last years, thank you. The comments often really helped me getting my focus back or, on the really bad days, even getting out of bed.
And if Martin had not been such a profound anchor for me on top of being an amazing human to work with, there is a very high chance the game would have never come out and our awesome little company would have never gotten its first full release. Thank you.
--Mario
Alright. Deep breath.
And now let's roll out some tanks, shoot the PCX to pieces and have some fun!