Last week, we asked our community on Discord to submit questions (about Soul's Remnant and otherwise) for our dear developers Sage (Chaomoon) & Rajah to answer. We're ready to share their answers to the 19 questions we picked out from the 200+ submitted and sate your curiosity now, so here you go!
Sage and Rajah: Yes, including party dynamics like this is something we plan to do in future content. It's something we have in mind and may work towards for future content, but nothing is 100% set in stone yet in terms of the specifics.
Sage: It was a fairly intensive process. It took me several months of continuous work, maybe around 3-4 months of work if I had to estimate. The server stayed the same the whole time, so the process was essentially just recreating the client in Godot 4 to be able to engage with the server in the same way the old GameMaker client did. Honestly, it was kind of a fun project, and even felt kind of like a game because it kind of went like this... first, the new game client in Godot had something, so I started with making it able to have a player you could move around... then I added the terrain blocks, so you had a map to run around on. With everything I added, it felt like a game where I was "unlocking" some new functionality, like the ability to view my inventory, ability to use portals to go between maps, adding skills back into the game, etc. In the end, it took quite a while to add every feature that was in the old client into the new one, but it was a fun process and the game ended up much better for it once we had fully moved over to Godot! I immediately noticed performance improvements and graphic quality improvements for example, as I was moving things over. In terms of challenges, there wasn't anything huge... it was just a long process. Of course I had to really get a grip on how the Godot game engine worked to comfortably move everything over, but I had been learning Godot for about 9 months or so before I even started to move things over, so I was already fairly familiar with it. Overall, I'm very glad we moved things over to Godot and I love the engine!
Sage: This is something I'm considering. I'm a big fan of fan projects for the game, like community-made websites that are tools to help people in enjoying the game, and I believe an API could be helpful in aiding the community in making more cool tools. That being said, in terms of tools, any quality of life features that are widely requested by the community, we would like to just add directly into the game if it makes sense too, rather than make people use websites built by others. Also, while we allow community-made tool websites and such, we still do not permit any mods or tools that involve modifying the game's client. This violates our Terms of Service, and we do not expect to change our position on this.
Sage and Rajah: To move Soul's Remnant beyond Early Access, it's essentially a game of content. We want to have more fully fleshed out content, especially in the late game aspect of the game. This is a big focus of ours as we work on future content right now, and so we imagine this will be a big part of bringing Soul's Remnant to its eventual 1.0 release. For example, we want to add more dungeons, more story/lore, more party quests, more bosses and monsters, more items, more areas, more skills and various improvements to our skill system.
Sage and Rajah: We're planning to horizontally expand the game in ways that allow players to increase their power in ways that don't involve just leveling. In terms of balancing, we will try our best to properly balance all skills and builds, but as with all games, it is inevitable that there will be a build that is technically the "meta" build. But, we will do our best to diversify the playstyles players can pick from, so they can choose whichever playstyle is most fun for them.
Rajah: We will address it one way or another; we have a lot of things to do in our backlog and what we're planning, but it's a very good question to bring up. We will look into this.
Rajah: Yes, we do try to allow for a support playstyle in the game, but we are still figuring this out. We will be looking out for player feedback on this, as it would be very helpful for refining this system and giving supports a proper and established place in our game that doesn't feel underwhelming or make players who prefer this playstyle feel left behind.
Rajah: We are considering making changes in this department, but it would need extensive testing, so no promises yet!
Sage and Rajah: Well, that's for you guys to figure out! <3
Sage and Rajah: Yes, we do plan to increase the level cap, but we plan to do this in a way that won't make it hard for new players to catch up. We plan to primarily focus on horizontal expansion of character progression, but increasing the max level cap is something we plan to do in coordination with that as well.
Sage and Rajah: Yes, it would be a lot of fun to collab with games we like!
Sage: My top picks would be my main MMO-game inspirations, like MapleStory Classic World (this one for sure 100%), Mabinogi or Ragnarok Online.
Rajah: Dead Cells, Terraria, and Path of Exile. Those are the games I took inspiration from in terms of designing Soul's Remnant's gameplay, but for character design I like a lot of anime!
Sage: To be honest, I just really cared about the game and had a lot of drive and natural motivation/determination to keep going with it. As many of you know, the game was nothing but a pure passion project for me for many years, so for a long while I had no pressure on myself to fully release it at any point. Later on, it became clear that I was making something special that many people felt a connection to, so Rajah joined the team and we worked hard together to refine it to the early access releaseable state you all are playing today! In the early days, I just kept working on it because I love MMOs and always wanted to make my own. I grew up with games like MapleStory and Mabinogi in the 2000s and they left a big impact on me. Once those updated beyond a point where I enjoyed them and I stopped playing them as much, I was always looking for new MMOs to play, but nothing really "fit" with what I wanted. Honestly, very little was appealing to me, and even still I don't find really any new MMOs from big companies entice me, sadly. Also, I've always been someone who enjoyed creating things. I find creating games more fun than playing them, funnily enough haha. So, I guess I combined the two interests and from a fairly young age, became very fixated on creating my own MMO. I became obsessed with MMO server networking and server architecture. Fast forward through many years, and after several small projects that went no-where, I started Soul's Remnant in 2016! (Originally called "Untitled", then named "Soul's Remnant" in 2019).
Sage and Rajah: Yes, as we mentioned above.
Sage and Rajah: We can't disclose specifics about the system at the moment as it's still in development, but we're working hard to ensure that there's something for everyone as we're well aware that there are players who also prefer more permanent progression and would like to cater to them too. That being said, we can say that seasons will offer a fresh take on Soul's Remnant for the players who want to participate in them!
Rajah: Yeah, that's a general balancing problem and we will address it in a future patch.
Sage and Rajah: We will add it when Sage goes into the general chat on Discord and doesn't get harassed.
Sage and Rajah: Yeah, we hear people's feedback about this and likely plan to remove it in a future patch.
Sage and Rajah: At the moment we are fairly comfortable with the size of the dev team, but in the future it could be nice to hire new developers (if we have the proper funds for that) if it feels like it fits, to be able to ideally speed up the development process a bit.
Sage: I haven't yet, that sounds dangerous.
We hope you enjoyed reading the responses to the community's questions from the Devs! We've got plenty more exciting news to share in the days to come, so keep an eye out for more announcements soon!
Credit for our new announcement banner goes to Slither (Joke), winner of our recent Fan Art Contest!