Feb 9, 2023

Rogue: Genesia, February monthly DevBlog

Rogue: Genesia - PlexusDuMenton

Hello Everyone!

I hope 2023 is going well so far for you.
As you may have noticed, I recently update the game's store graphics
I always felt like a more proffesional artwork would be better, This one ended up taking me more time than I expected, but I'm quite happy with the result.

January

January was a very busy month, Adding a ton of new Quality of life I wanted to add into the game for a long time, as well as implementing a new avatar that toally change the game-play and many preparation for the developement that is left to be done during February

Quality of Life

Ton of new quality of life, either often requested of small things I wanted to add into the game for a bit of time now

Chest opening FX

A small addition which was greatly asked by many players, having a better animation when opening chests.

New GameOption menu (with the modding options)

This was something I wanted to implement into the game for a bit of time now.
The way most option was handled was very manual, and adding a simple toggle would often require more between 45 to 90 min of work and testing, and often leaved some minor bug into the menuing.
The new GameOption menu Automatically handles many option types, allowing me to add optiosn in a matter of minutes.
A similar option menu has also been added for Mods, allowing modded to add options.
The menu is still not totally completed as I also wish to add tabs so we could have differents tabs for each mods or multiple tabs for a mods.

Camera lock option

Another very requested feature, some players complained that the game would give them motion sickness due to how the camera is handled. So now there is an simple toggle to lock the camera into the player.

Anachronistic visual improvement

With more experience, I am finally skilled enough to make the visual FX I always wanted to add to anachronistic.
I also know that leaving the ability to "draw" to player can lead to some surprises

New Auto Aiming

Auto-aiming is also at the top of the most requested features.
Auto-aiming was already in the game, but it was simply taking the player's movement direction as an aiming direction. Now it properly aim for the closest enemy.

Card Details

The ability to have every information possible on card is another thing I wanted to add into the game for a long time.
This new card details can be opened at any time (simply click on the card when inside the card list or press the hotkey (check binds) when in the card selection menu)
There is still things left to be improved about it, but it'll allow player to have every information possible about a card.

Musics

Music in the game has been a bit of a difficult subject.
I have no skill related to music creation and was dependant on Myrtle Mist, however, his situation being a bit of difficult.
He did not had much time to focus on the music creation, also, with a bit of hindsight, I believe his music style is not fit for the style of the game.
This is why a few weeks ago, I've started to search for a new musician, with a style more fit for the game to work with me.

As of now, Scott J. Holmes will be working on the OST of the game, and here is the first music he has done:

Fight/action music will be slowly replaced by Scott's music, they are more fit for the game. however, as I know that some players will prefer the old music, I'll leave an option to keep the old music instead.

Content

Content wise, this update will be lighter than other major updates. as the update is more focus into adding new major features and reworking the game internal code, in the end, there is no time left for content.
However, I still have some new content to show off to players:

Thunder

There is a few additions related to the thunder element,

Thunder spirit.
This new Soul-card give a chance for each attack to create an arc lighting striking in chain nearby enemies

2 new evolution for the thunder staff got added,

Thunder Vial - Evolution of Thunder Staff and Explosive vial.
The Storm's staff - Evolution of Thunder staff and Thunder spirit

Active Talents

Actives Talents are finally close to being finished, only missing the Katana, every weapon talent has an active ability.
When unlocked, you'll have an orange bar at the bottom of your screen that will slowly fill-up over time. You can consume a part of this bar to cast a powerful ability related to your weapon.
Making the 20 talents of each of the weapons was a big task that will bring more variety to the game.

Gun-Slinger

A new avatar has come into town, the Gun-Slinger.

The gun slinger gameplay is very different from the usual game. There is no automatic attack, there is also only one weapon, his Pistol, you'll have also have to handle the ammo and reload at the right time.
The gunslinger also has 12 exclusive soul-cards and 9 possible weapon evolution to his pistol.
For now, the avatar hunbalanced and will get rebalanced in the near future.

Today

For my current task, I've started reworking since last week on 2 important refactorisation of the game's code.
The first refactorisation is about the way the game handles the stages, difficulties, and Game-mode.
Until now, the game modes and difficulty were hard-coded, now they are modular.
This refactorisation also prepare the code for one of the next Major update main feature, Zone variations.
This allows 2 important things:
1- Adding new difficulties, Stage or gamemode will require minor work and not having to deal with spaghetti code.
2- Modding in these into the game will be much more easier (where it was close to impossible before) while not yet supported by the Modding API, this is something that can be supported in the future without much rework.

The second refactorisation that is still in progress, is a complete rework of how the enemy's data are handled.
Right now, each enemy for each difficulty and for each game-mode are completely separate entities in the data. This leads to having about 140+ different enemies to handle.
This makes balancing the game a difficult task, and also having a bestiary completely impossible.
The new data structure will clean-up everything, having a single data per monster, and having a custom multiplier for each difficulty.
This change will likely have an impact on the balancing, since the way the enemy is chosen will also have to be changed, and the whole balancing of survivor mode will likely be changed as well.
This second refactorisation is an important step before I start working with D-rank survivors, which should come into the beta during next week.

Things left to be done

Once the D-rank survivors will be finished, there are still a few things that will be left to be finished:

Avatar animations

Avatar animations are going smoothly now. I've finally found a skilled animator to handle the current avatars, the only sad part is that she is only available for the next 2 months, so we'll try to have the most done as possible during those 2 months.
So far, Shop-keeper animations are done, the Knight Rog animation got a small improvement, next up is the Gun-slinger and then the Rogue.

Events

While their features are programmed and roughly working, there is only a placeholder event into the game as of now, so I'll likely spend a few days into adding interesting events during February

Passive Talents

There are right now only 5 passives talents, they have not been a focus lately, but I plan to add a few dozen of them before the Update is ready to be released.
I'll also have to work on the unlocks to make their unlock condition interesting.

I'm still targeting the 0.8 update to be done in early march.
I'll create a news about the date when I am sure about that the update can be delivered on time.

Optimisation

About optimization, I'll let Fernanda talk about it as she's the one handling the optimization of the game right now.

Performance Improvements

Hi! I'm Fernanda, and I'm here to talk about upcoming Performance Improvements in Rogue: Genesia. We like to be clear, transparent, and so to address the elephant in the room for our players - we are fully aware right now of the many scenarios where low FPS and high RAM usage happens in the game, and I'm here to work diligently on aiding with those.

Most of the issues are caused by the fact Rogue: Genesia opts for a fast-paced scaling where you're able to have hundreds to thousands of projectiles on screen, all of which are colliding with enemies and performing calculations. In the past, games that attempted to push the envelop in this regard required custom solutions, and we are working on them.

Average and Low FPS Situations

The game as it is is fairly optimized and can run at high frame rates out of the spot, but the baseline FPS can still be increased. Currently the FPS curve of the game goes down drastically as more weapons, projectiles, size and attack speed go up. While a performance loss is expected, these can be mitigated.

The goal is to have a far smoother curve, where the baseline FPS is increased slightly (enough to guarantee 60-144 FPS in most machines) but the extreme endgame situations where the FPS drops to 10 or so are raised significantly. We're also aware that some weapons, like Thunder Staff and some cards like Thorns Firework can cause significantly harsher declines in the FPS, sometimes halting the game entirely.

There are plans in the works not only to mitigate these problematic weapons, but also to prevent weapons from ever achieving such situations. These include dynamic changes in the calculation mechanisms behind the scenes, better handling of the CPU to GPU pipeline, parametric calculations of collisions, among other advanced techniques to allow the game to continue having its bullet hell feel, while having a stable performance.

Many of these mechanics may also end up being exposed to modders so they can test the performance of their cards and adjust them.

Performance Analytics

In order to aid with the continued development of Rogue: Genesia, custom analytics tools to measure performance and find problems quickly are being made to finding problematic cards, weapons or scenarios easier. This should allow, in the future, less risks of versions being released with particularly slow effects.

RAM Issues

We're aware of many issues users have with regards of the high RAM consumption of the game. In layman terms, a lot of stuff that games show on screen can rely entirely on the framework or engine upon which they're built, and objects, weapons, enemies, levels and so on are loaded and unloaded in such a way that result in a stable, low memory consumption.

However, most of the existing frameworks do not deal very well with the amount of projectiles and objects that Rogue: Genesia has compared to other games, resulting in objects being loaded faster than they are unloaded from memory.

These technical challenges, while requiring bespoke solutions, are not impossible to solve. We're currently researching the best methods to implement ways to manually control these while preserving (or even adding to) the modularity expected for continued modding support.

The same holds true for VRAM usage - while less visible and less reported, a side-effect of our fixes will be that low end cards with lower VRAM will also benefit from better performance.

Conclusion, ETA and a Thank You

There's much work to be done, but the work is achievable, and it's our goal to make sure that the game leaves Early Access in pristine condition - not just feature-wise, not just gameplay-wise, but also performance-wise.

The ETA for these improvements should come in batches throughout this month during beta and the next. The biggest culprits (RAM handling, Thorn Spikes, Thunder Staff, Fractal 2 Pike, and so on) are being targeted first in order to make sure players cannot run into situations where picking the wrong card can ruin their experience.

In addition, a general layout of the identified issues, slowdown causes and solutions has been mapped out, and once a more stable and robust framework is built in the game to specifically handle performance, the ongoing effort to maintain and increase FPS should be less of an "effort", and more of a natural byproduct of a smooth development cycle.

Thank you for your support and your patience,
Fernanda

Replying to some question about modding

I have also noticed some question or some things that seamed a bit unclear during the last post about modding, so I'm going to respond to that:

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author
nexus? as someone that uses mods quite a bit, I'll be honest I rarely even check steam workshop I just go right to nexusmods.com. I guess I really should check the workshop more often if it's there

Personally I think Nexus has a pretty bad user experiences, this also don't solve any issues related to the game correctly handling mods or not.
As of now, the current way the mods are centralized is through ThunderStore, but Most user will prefer Steam workshop as it's implemented by default in Steam.

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author
Before transition to support two distinct version of the game using mono and IL2CPP at the same time, you may want to check if you couldn't solve modding problem in IL2CPP using Unity Addressables. It can be used to load pre-defined things during runtime, and with a bit of tinkering these pre-defined things may be also compiled at runtime using content from StreamAssets directory and Addressables API.

I personally think that the best way to support modding is to make the game as a actual mod, like Neverwinter I was made - so starting from day 0 with that in mind.

Anyway, best of luck!

From my experiences, Addressable is not a very stable feature of unity (I already got many issues related to that), I'm not sure the amount of workload it would require to make your suggestiong doable.

Another reason I also prefer to go to Mono for modding, is that the game Class is much easier to access in Mono, than IL2CPP, since the class, function and everything is still compiled in cpp. Making moding for moder much more difficult and less friendly.

About making the game as an actualy mod, this is way to late for that now. but more vanilla content is handled in a similar way that the game handle modded content (soul-card, difficulties, gamemode, avatars...)

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author
The creator of necesse managed to get a workshop page for the mods for his game, and it also uses BepInEx as far as I know, maybe he can help you to do the same with rogue genesia, he's very active and always helping ppl with everything on his discord!

This is a possibility I through about.
But I don't like the idea of required an external software into a game sold on Steam.
also, since R:G is using IL2CPP, an experimental version of BepinEx is required, which can easily lead to a great deal of issues I would have no control over.

Feb 9, 2023

Patch Notes v0.12 (Lolzaurus Edition)

Scholar of the Arcane Arts - Tony

Hey Scholars!

There is new patch for Scholar of the Arcane Arts! Patch Notes v0.12 (Lolzaurus Edition).

New Spells

Abyssal Wall

Necrotic Shield

Decaying Touch

Necrotic Orb

Nekra’s Scythe

Solaris

These spells will be starter spells so you have a high chance of finding them.

Spell Updates

Summon Deadwood:

Update: No longer a starter spell. It has been moved to the Tier 2 loot pool.

To-Nei’s Burst:

This spell will hold you in place for 2 seconds. It doesn’t matter if you’re spawning 5 fireballs, or 500.

Mudball:

You can now combine all the evolutions of Mudball. This will reward Scholars who are combining Mudball efficiently. If done right this has the potential to do huge damage. So we need to tune some things down.
Update:
Cooldown 3 seconds => 5 seconds
Pyromancy Combo 4x Damage => 2x Damage
Geomancy Combo now slows Mudball’s speed by half

Scattershot:

This spell is too good. I don’t want to nerf it too hard because it's super satisfying. But something needs to be done because it’s outshining all the other spells. I’m moving it from the Tier 2 loot pool to Tier 3 so it will be harder to find.
Update: Cooldown 12 seconds => 18 seconds

Seren’s Falling Star:

Update: Cooldown 80 seconds => 50 seconds

Ice drill:

Update Cooldown 8 seconds => 6 seconds

Gaia’s Shield:

Update: Cooldown 25 seconds => 22 seconds

Nera’s Shield:

Update: Cooldown 25 seconds => 22 seconds

Dragon’s Shield:

Update: Cooldown 25 seconds => 22 seconds

Splash:

Splash is severely outperforming even late game spells. Being able to deal ~ 300 damage every 3 seconds is a little crazy for a starter spell. So now Splash can only interact with a school of magic once. Don’t worry, those crazy interactions aren’t gone. The new spell Riptide acts just like the old Splash. The only difference is that Riptide is not available as a starter spell.

Update: Geomancy combination will allow Splash to go through walls

Removed: Geomancy combination spawns mudpatches. Splash could interact with a school of magic multiple times

Spell Combinations

Necromancy is being added to the game! Which means I need to update every spell that can interact with other spells. There are some complicated combinations that I am planning to do with Necromancy combinations, but that will take time. So for now this patch will update the combinations that are a little simpler.
The following spells can now be combined with Necromancy (I've purposely hidden them under a spoiler so you can enjoy finding new combinations):
•Thornpatch
•Hailsphere
•Tars Rock
•Water Sphere
•Mudball
•Boulder Drill
•Seren’s Barrage
•Rock Throw
•Tree of Hope
•Summon Deadwood
•Splash

Spell Availability

Certain spells will only be added to the loot pool after special requirements have been met. Once you’ve performed a task or found a secret that unlocks a spell, Morello will let you know that you’ve successfully completed the special requirement.

The following spells have been removed from the loot pool and must be unlocked:
•Tree of Hope
•Ronin’s Shield
•Seren’s Falling Star

Gameplay Updates

Scholar no longer immediately sprints at the beginning of the level. They will only sprint by pressing Shift.

The Spellbook has been updated with a scrollbar so I can continue to add spell slots without worrying about how much room Morello has.

This allows me to update Scholar with as many spells as I can think of. Who needs sleep when there are spells to craft!

Test dummies now show status effects.

The Spellbook’s top bookmark has also been updated to show every interaction between schools of magic. I rearranged it a bit too, so it should be easier to read.

The first few upgrades into a Spell’s Cast Time will greatly improve the Cast Time. All subsequent upgrades have diminishing returns until you reach Instant Cast. This change allows a player to upgrade a variety of spells once or twice and feel good about it, even if they can’t reach Instant Cast yet.

Bugs Fixed

Vera was incorrectly showing how Boulder Drill’s damage would be upgraded. She now correctly shows how Boulder Drill will deal 50% of Power Level per drill.

Splash’s descriptions are now working.

Deadwood no longer crashes the game when combo’d with fire. It was a literal crash and burn situation. This has been fixed!

Firewall no longer inverts the colors of your minimap.

We had a player who spawned 10 deadwoods. He upgraded the Deadwoods so they would cast Splash. They would shoot 10 Splashes, hit 2 Icewalls which would spawn a total of 90 Splashes, then each of those would hit a Rockwall which would spawn 10 mudpatches each, for a total of 900 mudpatches per attack. Super cool and super unsustainable! I like the mudpatch interaction so I’ll be moving it to a spell that can’t duplicate itself.

Secrets have been added… Good luck with your search!
Check out game Discord, share ideas for new spells and discuss with other players.

- Endo