Hello fellow Tiny Rogues!
It's me. I'm back—back again—with a short dev blog.
April has been a fruitful month. As I alluded to in the last post, we have indeed transitioned into content production by now.
In my mind, I split the workload of content production into 2 blocks.
Block A: All player stuff, traits, equipment, weapons, companions, ...
Block B: All enemy stuff, floors, enemy behaviors, attacks, ...
In April we started to seriously dent Block A. I am currently in the process of finishing up the last few scripts needed to set up all equipment items.
I also have an overview right now of what the new version entails in terms of Block A.
Category
Current count according to Tiny Rogues Wiki
New count according to project files
Weapons
400
439
Equipment
649
783
Traits
137
158
Companion Summon Items
60
75
Classes
34
33 (have not worked on new class designs yet, and Santa is taking a short break)
I did hope to show off ALL the new cool weapon attacks, but we are still finishing up some stuff on that front. I do want to make an all-encompassing post that explains all changes coming to weapons and shows off all new and old attack types.
For now though:
The following pictures are just random and work-in-progress stuff from our dev discord channel. I just had these lying around and they were not specifically created or curated for a marketing post.
Either way, Thorce is really cooking when it comes to the new laser shaders. He has a much better eye for animation curves and all that stuff compared to myself. Hope you are ready for the improved game feel!
Another random tidbit that I recently showed off on the community Discord: every offhand now has a miniature version that will be displayed on your in-world character while wearing it.
This picture also includes some spoilers for upcoming offhand item changes, for example:
Scepters are now going to be offhand items that grant you companions. This is much more fitting for the regal theme of scepters in my opinion. Yes, the Fishing Net is now a scepter, which proves your status as the lord and ruler over all jellyfish.
There is a new type of offhand called Censers. These grant you an Aura.
You might wonder now, if scepters are going to be offhand items, what will shoot the big lazor beam? Well, a new magic weapon type called Sorceries.
As sorcery is often depicted and described in fiction, it's channeled through your innate magical abilities and not through a wooden stick in your hand.
Sorceries are special in that way because they have a dynamic handling type: when you wear an offhand, they are treated as one-handed weapons; when you don't, they are treated as two-handed weapons.
I am also happy to report that a clearer timeline is slowly forming inside my head.
If we can finish up Block A in the next 2 to 3 weeks, then we can tackle Block B in the month after that. After that, the game is technically fully playable again and the update can go into a sort of "closed alpha". From there it's only like 1-2 weeks away from an open beta.
So we are looking at the start of open beta for the update maybe in the first week of July? (this is a rough estimation, not a fixed announcement)
From there everything will go super quick but I do want to spend more time in beta this time than we did for the Between Heaven & Hell update.
End of August seems like a feasible estimation for the real update release, but maybe I am completely cooked for even saying that out loud right now. It would be really nice though because it would leave plenty of time to make smaller follow-up updates throughout the rest of the year.
As said in the last blog, I eventually want to start to deep dive the update more in these blog posts but right now we are so locked in that I really don't have the time and energy to write some big elaborate blog post. I am also still wondering in which order I want to even tackle all of it.
One of the first manifesto posts will probably be about "the goal of the update", explaining all my feelings on the current state of the game and what and why I wanted to change things. From there we can move into more detail on concrete new and changed features.
Cheers,
RubyDev