Hey friends!

I know we've been really quiet lately. Too quiet... But that's because we've been saving it all up for this moment: LAUNCH DAY IS ALMOST HERE! Roundguard will be bouncing onto Steam on March 13th! AHH! SO SOON!

Check out our fun new trailer we have to celebrate! We went full on Saturday morning cartoons in this one, because you know the best way to play Roundguard is in your jammies.

Hi friend!

Well, there went October. You all have to be tired of me starting every update like this, but seriously, what even is time? And how do I buy more of it?

Anyway, as we barrel towards our content complete deadline, we've been cramming in a ton of new content. New boards, new random encounters, new trinkets, new things to unlock... Oh! And a brand new boss fight! I don't want to spoil everything, but inspired by October, the spookiest of months, we decided we needed a heart-pounding final encounter...



As you can see, it is 100% anatomically accurate.

Of course, when you do beat that final boss, you need a reward. So now you'll get one of the Roundguard's powerful relics! Each relic changes the rules of the game in new and strange ways. Many make the game harder, but you might be able to use their effects to your advantage if you're clever. Before you start a new run, you can choose to activate one or more relics, and if you beat the game with them active, you'll master the relic and get a shiny gooooold version.



And in tomorrow's beta update, we'll be adding in another handful of stuff, including a new elite: The Goblin Poet. Because goblins are known for their eloquence.



He puts the beat in beat poetry.

In between all of the Roundguard work, Kurt and I went to the Roguelike Celebration in San Francisco. We met a ton of wonderful folks, geeked out over procedural generation, and drank roguelike-themed cocktails. It was the best. I even gave a mini design talk, if you're into those. (If you are, you should check out the rest of the talks too!)

And guess what, San Francisco? We'll be back again this weekend, showing off Roundguard at the Day of the Devs event! There are going to be sooooooo many amazing indie games and it's all free. If you're around, come say hi! For all the rest of you who don't live in San Francisco, well... you can always find us in the Discord. :)

<3
Andrea

Hi friend!

Is summer over already? Oh well. I’m pulling out the fuzzy blankets and steaming mugs of tea, ready to warm myself in the glow of my computer screen… Time for cozy game dev!

It was so lovely getting to see old friends and meet new ones at PAX West. The Indie MEGABOOTH experience was overwhelming at times – sorry to everyone who I had to stop mid-sentence to keep the booth running – but I was so proud of our little game. The Indie MEGABOOTH has been my favorite stop for years and years and this time we got to be at the heart of it! Thanks everyone for making it such a good time.

On the home front, our biggest new update is: Fizz the Wizard is fully playable!

Fizz is a young adventurer, still learning to control her magic, but she’s pumped to explore the dungeon and give it her all. All her frogs, that is.



You may wonder where she keeps all those frogs. Well, you know what’s even better than dresses with pockets? Dresses with pocket dimensions.

Fizz has a bubbly personality and a talent for making (summoning) friends, but she’s no lightweight. She’s been electric on the leaderboards and the boss monsters cry out in terror when they see her frogs coming. But she’s also been a bit… buggy?



See, when she equips her lightning skill, lightning bugs appear on the side walls, pacing up and down, and her bolts zap in a line between her and the bugs. But as punishment to us for adding literal bugs to the game, these bugs have been the buggiest bugs ever to bug. There was that one time when they began multiplying into an enormous swarm that wouldn’t stop until it crashed your game. Or that other time when they just decided to take a vacation and disappear for no reason. I think after this next update we will have finally tamed these bugs, but I’m scared to say it too loudly in case they hear.

Anyway… Fizz has kept us busy, but we’ve been working away at lots more polish and tuning and new random encounters and all that good stuff. This weekend I asked the beta crew what they wanted more of in the game and they said level layouts. So I put some assets in the Goodies folder to let everyone build level ideas and it’s been a ton of fun getting those into the game.



Maybe you have a level idea you’d like to see in the game? Come over to the Discord and share it with us!

<3
Andrea

Hey friend!

First up, we're super excited to announce we'll be showing off Roundguard all four days in the Indie MEGABOOTH at PAX West later this month! It's gonna be so much fun. We'll have goodies and high fives to share, so please come stop by and say hi!

We also just released a new trailer! Check it out here on the main page! I love the bouncy new song Bob wrote for it -- it's perfect for a 1 minute dance party. Throughout, you'll catch peeks at a lot of the new work we've done in the last couple of months.

The Discord has been a flurry of beta feedback and fun ideas. We've made tons of balancing changes and bug fixes, and we've added several new elite fights, enemy encounters, and trinkets! Like this dark elf chef. She has a taste for spider egg omelettes and impossibly high standards.


I'm not usually a whisk-taker, but you know what they say: no whisk, no reward.

Along the way, we've also been working on getting the Wizard to a playable state. Here she is showing off her lightning reflexes...


Shockingly, I'm all out of puns for this one.

So yeah, please say hi to us at the Indie MEGABOOTH! We'll need that friend energy to keep us going, and there will be tons of great games to check out. The line-up is pretty huge, but if you need a quick cheat sheet, here are a few cute & weird roguelikes that will be showing near us:

- Delve into the mines to find crazy relics and adorable slimes in UnderMine.
- Slide your way through a turn-based prison full of surreal criminals in Plunge.
- Use cute cats as weapons to save Grandma from an ancient evil in Cat Lady.

You like cute & weird roguelikes, right? :)

<3
Andrea

Hey friend!

Let get straight to it -- do you want to play some Roundguard now? Are you okay with unfinished content and the occasional horrible crash? Then come play the beta and please give us feedback! I would love to have your help to make the game better.

We're managing the beta through our Discord. Join in, read the #beta-welcome channel, and get your Steam key!

A couple weeks ago, we rolled out the beta and we've had a great response! Thank you to everyone who's helped us track down some nasty bugs, smooth out some rough spots, and given us tons of great ideas for what we're missing. Besides lots of bug fixes and quality of life improvements, I added some new dank and deadly backgrounds for Act III...



And a ton of new board layouts for our room generator...



I think this next month we'll finally get to work on that Wizard... So yeah! Come play!

And if you haven't already, don't forget to wishlist Roundguard. Adding wishlists will actually help you in the Summer Sale Grand Prix game!

<3
Andrea

Hey friend! How was your May?
 
I know I’m a little late with this, but we’ve shown off Roundguard at five events in three different time zones this month, so I guess what I’m saying is time is the enemy and I need a nap. But we’ve returned home victorious from our battles with the inexorable clock, laden with new laurels (Official Selection for Momocon and Dreamhack Dallas Showcases) and an actual golden bat for winning the PC Connect Pitch Competition. Epic loot drop! But of course, more important than the journey was all the friends we made along the way.


Hi new friends!

So in between all that action, what happened on the game? Well, I completed an animation pass on all the remaining enemies. Ettins grumble and shout, minotaurs swing big axes, dark elf illusions burst with sparkly effects, magical beams crackle with energy… I still have plenty of polish work left to do, but at least everybody wiggles now.


Sparkles of doom!

We dropped in a first pass at hover text, our theatre host now greets you with a proper introduction, and I did a tune up on the big jiggly eye monster boss on my Twitch stream…


This is the kind of quality content you can expect from me.

And we got Chaos rooms added to the map generator. A Chaos room is like a Treasure room, but monsters from any biome can spawn in together. It’s CHAOS! (And oh, the new bugs this creates!)

What about the beta, you ask? Well, my friend, we are SO close. Like finger hovering over the red button close. We’re going to do our first test run with folks in Discord, so if you want in, come join the Roundguard Discord now.

Okay, things are about to get hot and spicy around here! Looking forward to a fun June…

<3
Andrea

Hey friend, how have you been?

The last month for Roundguard has been a lot of balancing tweaks, tutorial rework, and bug bug bug fixing. Not the most exciting stuff to talk about, but it's so nice to feel it all coming together. On the art side, I finished a pass on every last monster and fixed up a bunch of UI. But enough words, let's see some pictures!

Here's a sneak peek of the ettin. I'm going to be animating him on my Twitch channel today -- like, probably right now! Come by and ask me for my ettin impression.



After a year of ignoring it, we finally did a rework of the opening UI flow. Major thanks to Aeos for the great feedback / therapy session while I worked out the character select screen on stream. UI, man, it takes a village.



Flagon's healing skill got a rebrand to Gold Lust...



And for those of you who were worried, the "round" books are gone. No more do you have to wonder if they're actually clam shells or toilet seats. What was a misguided attempt at world-building has been corrected. They're square books now. Just books.



Oh, is it May already? Guess what? We've got some events this month! Come by for a high five!

iFest -- Seattle -- May 4
PG Connects -- Seattle -- May 13-14
🍑Momocon🍑 -- Atlanta -- May 23-26

And one more at the very end of the month that we can't talk about yet... 😬 They said the announcement will probably go out next week, so I'll be sure to share it first on the Roundguard Discord.

Talk again soon!

<3
Andrea

How did this month go by so fast? I swear I was just crowing about our new bosses, and then it's just a blur of goblins and handshakes and my daughter puking everywhere and... Look, I survived March. Stronger, wiser (?), and ready to put some more spring into springtime. (You know, 'cause the heroes bounce? Eh, eh? Get it?)

Okay, what did we get done? We've added ten new peg types, including a two-headed tantrum-prone toddler ettin, an illusionist dark elf, a plane-hopping phase spider, way too many goblins, and a cabal of cultist skeletons determined to open a portal to the netherworld. Yeah, World 3 is gonna be wild.



That wraps up the basic logic for all of World 3, so now I've just got to do a bunch of art and balancing work! (If you want to see more of how that comes together, swing by my Twitch channel and shout at me to stream again. It's been too loooooooong and I miss hanging out with all yous.)

We're also hard at work at getting online leaderboards fully up and running and all that boring backend stuff that's needed to run a beta. We're close! I keep saying the beta will be "soon" and you all know how good game developers are at estimating timelines, but we're definitely in SOON™ territory now.



Oof, deadlines.

Besides all that, we had a great time at SXSW and GDC. I met so so many new friends and personal heroes -- I even got the thumbs up on Roundguard from several of the original Peggle developers! (And learned a few of their secrets...) I got mounds of helpful feedback and I'm overwhelmed and exhausted but excited to get back to work! Let's do this!

I hope everyone is having fun at PAX East without us! Pop into the Roundguard Discord and tell us if you see any cool games we should check out. And while we're not at PAX East, we will be out on the east coast in a couple of months... I'll let you know the details as soon as its announced. :D
Talk again soon!

<3
Andrea

It's been busy over here at Roundguard HQ. We just completed a full pass of World 2, adding in lots of new monsters and traps including petrifying trolls, armored skeletons, mysterious rune stones, and orcs with steam blasters blowing everything around. (Rogues, beware. They can blast your arrows and smoke bombs too.) That brings our unique peg type total up to more than 40 and we've still got World 3 to go! But our biggest new addition is *dun dun dun* BOSS FIGHTS.

We wanted the world breaks to end with a bang, so we created a boss fight unique to each one. At the end of World 1 you'll face the alchemist with her collection of ever-changing unstable potions, and at the end of World 2 you'll take on this big guy...



While the bosses at the end of each world stay the same -- so you have something to strategize toward as you develop your build -- they each have procedural elements that change every run to keep you on your toes. New potions are brewed, eyeballs are shuffled, and topnotch threatening laughs are manufactured. (BWA + HA + HEE-HEE?) Okay, I made that last one up.



The next month will be jam-packed as we cram to get in the rest of World 3 and tidy things up for the beta. Plus we've got events! Roundguard was nominated for the Indie Pitch Competition at SXSW so Kurt and Bob will be down in Austin for that, and then I'm on my way to SF 'cause I got picked to join the Pixelles at GDC. If you're gonna be at SXSW or GDC, give us a shout! And of course, no matter where we are on the planet, you can always find us swapping bad puns and bug GIFs in the Roundguard Discord.

Talk again soon!

<3
Andrea

Hello everyone! We've got news!

First off, we've finally setup our Discord server. Come join us!

Secondly, we're getting close to starting up our super special CLOSED BETA in the next few months! If you're interested in getting an early peek at Roundguard and providing us with some valuable feedback, join us on Discord and say hi!

That's it for now, check back later for more updates!