Hello!
In the last Tiny Rogues News post I promised another blog post at the end of March, and here we are... in March. (Time passes too quickly!)
Once more, we made some great progress. Overall though, I must report that March was quite a bit slower than expected. This is because I unexpectedly started working on some dev-tooling to make content creation easier. Originally we thought we would be able to skip this step for a while and just rely on IDE auto-complete and IntelliSense, but I deemed those to be not good, easy and quick enough.
It's a bit of a bummer that not as much as I hoped for happened in March but in the long term it will pay off.
I really hoped that March would mark the beginning of content (re-)production. Only once we start to actually reimplement the games content (items, enemies, ...) I will be able to accurately gauge when the update will actually be ready.
The good news is, we are ramping up in speed. I'd say 97% of base components are (re-)implemented and we are on the precipice of moving into the content creation period. (The last year was basically all R&D and systems implementation.) The game is now nearly completely rewritten and we even have cool new in-game editor tools which will eventually smooth the transition into modding from in-game, which is going to be very cool.
It might look a bit confusing to an outsider and in all honesty wasn't even worth making a GIF for. It's an editor for the game files. It runs in-game and it uses our own serialization and deserialization. (How data is read and written into files.) The really neat part about having started to develop our own editor tooling is that this lays the groundwork for possibly (and hopefully) not using Unity anymore in future projects.
As we are transitioning into this content production era, it's finally time to be more vocal about the update! I am so excited that the update is becoming less and less elusive every day.
That's why I decided to do monthly dev blogs from now on to keep you in the loop. With every month that passes, there will be less ambiguity in my posts.
I expect to be able to give concrete dates for e.g.: update beta, update release in 1-2 months from now. (Déjà vu?) I hope this suffices as a blog post for this month. Eventually I want to go into more detail on the design changes that are coming. I'm going to write a bunch of development manifestos, which go into detail on the underlying game design choices behind every change.
Let me know what you are most excited for, so I have a clearer picture of what to show off and talk about first:
Traits and Equipment (New stats, new effects, new possibilities that came with the rewrite.)
Weapons (New, old and removed weapon types, changes to weapons, weapon teasers, ...)
Consumables (Potion, Booze, and Infusion reworks, plus new cool and unique consumables.)
Enemies, Bosses and Floors (New world structure, new "Afterlife" Floors like the Abyss and their structure, changes to Elite Enemies, ...)
Character Classes (Reworks, new Classes, the entire skills revamp which will now include little skill trees for every character, ...)
Game Difficulty (Changes to Cinder, plans on leaderboards and Singleplayer ELO/Rank systems, ...)
Foundational System Changes (New souls EXP system, pickups, the Rogue Hideout, NPCs, Meta-Systems, ...)
Cheers,
RubyDev