Bug fixes
- High-speed falls could reach the game's limits
- Lightning speed could remain activated indefinitely
- Several collision issues with scenery
- Sylvio's glitch when facing certain scenery

Over the past few weeks, we've been running a competition for an artist to have a piece of work included in our new, upcoming map The Manor, with the theme being 'an advert for a camera that claims to be able to take photos of ghosts'. The competition is now closed, and over the past few days the development team has been voting for their favourite entry.

We'd like to thank everyone who entered their work. The entire team has been really impressed with the quality of the entries and it's no exaggeration to say we enjoyed every single piece and all the imaginative, original ideas you came up with. For that reason, it's been very difficult for the developers to choose a favourite!

That said, we're really pleased to reveal that saithefool is the winner of the competition with this incredible piece:



And although these pieces won't be featured in the game, here are the 4 amazing runners up, in no particular order:

kamma98:



zuma_reyan:



poshe:



obliviousowlsdomain:



Once again, a huge thank you to all the talented artists who entered the competition this year. We hope players enjoy keeping an eye out for the winning piece in the new map!

If you haven't checked out our recent teaser post for The Manor, you can do so here!

X: @DEVOUR_GAME
Discord: https://discord.gg/q4tTa2Z

Firstly, just a quick message to say that we have confirmed that Captain Disaster and the Two Worlds of Riskara is compatible with Steam Deck. One of our testers will be specifically looking at this, and below is a video of the demo in action:



In terms of development we are making steady progress. The first 4 acts of the game are fully playable with mostly final assets, whilst the fifth act is about half-way there. Testing is on-going, and now at the stage where we are moving the test build over to the Steam client and will begin to add achievement code. We're on course for a 2024 release, and hopefully within a couple of months we will be in a position to start thinking about a more specific release timeframe.


Finally I'd like to showcase a small walkthrough of some of the locations in Act 2, including some of the fantastic animations by Lorenzo and of course you can also hear a snippet of Eric's brilliant music score.

Hello everyone, time for the monthly dev blog!

This dev blog won't focus on new development since everything made is in the stable version.
In the first part, I'll talk about balancing and difficulty in Rogue: Genesia. Then I'll discuss the future months of development and what is planned!


Balancing a game is never an easy task.
And there is even a need for balance in the balancing. Having a perfectly balanced game is boring; it simply makes any choice meaningless as you end up with the same power/progression regardless of what you do. This is a trap I've seen quite a few games fall into (not specifically this genre).


One of the major components of balancing is handling the overall difficulty of a game over the time it's played.
Usually, you want it to start low and slowly increment to higher values.
However, what is considered ultra-hard for some players could qualify as easy for others.
This is true for many games, and this is true for Rogue: Genesia as well

My approach was to make the difficulty targeted at medium-core players, in part because I am part of this group, but also because I think it fits most players on Steam who actively look for indie games.

The game features a main progression that is made to be overall "easy" for this type of players so it's not a frustration point and allows players to progress if they want to. Meta-progression is also a tool I use for two purposes:

1. Giving tangible progression via the power of the characters, both with stats, effects, and more control over your build.
   
2. Allowing lower-skilled players to out-grind the difficulty if they really need to.

This is something I've seen Death Must Die miss when it first released, with a big progression wall during the second half of the current content (first act) which left a lot of players grinding with almost no progression until they finally beat their first run.
They quickly fixed this and improved the progression since then.
It is still a very good game that I would recommend to fans of the genre!


With the main progression of the game clearable for most players, another issue arose: the game is too easy for players with experience or hardcore gamers.
Which I totally shamelessly stole from Idle-Games, I admit!
I had to make all those wasted hours on Anti-Matter dimension worth it.
Challenges are modifiers of a run that add handicaps to players in multiple ways. They can both reduce the power of the players, increase the strength of monsters, or add special rules to alter the way players engage.

Similarly to idle-games, challenges give a reward to help the players push themselves in the form of rewards.

Then, another issue came up:
many players were frustrated by some of the hardest challenges (Like the original Snuffhead's Favourite which was impossible in its first version) even though they were "optional bonus content".
After exchanging with the vocal players about that, the main issue was the fact it gave gameplay advantages locked behind super hard content.
So the best compromise I could find was to simplify these challenges that unlocked content to be completable by most players with a bit of experience, and make hardcore challenges that only unlock cosmetic stuff on "Hard Mode challenges".
This calmed the frustration of players about the hard challenges and allowed the players looking for challenges to be satisfied.

But alas, as the game gets more content, the possibility of getting stronger also increased, so for the most experienced players, even the hardest of the hard challenges became a regular run for them, and a cool suggestion appeared:
Allowing challenges to be leveled up.

This was quite simple to implement (scale the modifiers with the challenge level or increase the world rank (or both)), and allowed almost unlimited difficulty for those hardcore players.
Leveling a challenge doesn't unlock anything and won't ever, as it's only there as a playground for players looking for the most extreme challenges.


Another important aspect to balance is the different playstyles that the game allows.
This is important to keep depth in the game to ensure all playstyles allow for equivalent progression.
And while it's not totally voluntary at first, the game ended up with having 5 main (and 2 sub) damage archetypes that have been identified. More are likely to appear as new content is added to the game:

1. Raw Power
   This is the first archetype players will play with; it is quite easy to achieve, has good damage output, and has a lot of cards to support it.
   
2. Metal transmutation
   This is also a popular damage archetype that allows players to have both good defense and offense. It takes a little bit of set-up to obtain it but ends up having decent damage output.
   
3. Lunar Inferno
   Sub-archetype very similar to Metal transmutation, is a damage archetype that scales off both defense and damage mitigation, with the price of reducing other Power damage sources. The strongest archetype early-game but falls behind other archetypes in the late game.
   
4. Blood Transmutation
   This one, while sounding similar to Metal Transmutation, is in fact very different. It is likely one of the strongest archetypes but also one of the hardest to properly achieve, as it requires a lot of artifacts and cards to obtain but has very good damage output while giving survivability.
   
5. Faith
   This one received a lot of improvement during the 0.9.1 Update, adding a whole bunch of cards to support this damage archetype. It is one of the strongest ones but also one of the hardest to play with. It sure gives humongous damage output but also makes you very weak and easy to die as any damage you take is greatly increased (and negative armor applies AFTER damage mitigation).
   
6. Defense Piercing & Defense Shredding
   This last Main Archetype has a low initial damage but is also the damage archetype that can reach the highest value due to the ramp-up nature of this, so it's very useful for high corruption growth challenges where other archetypes may fail damage-wise. Update 0.9.1.3 also buffed this archetype as it now slightly scales with the damage multiplier of your weapon. I'm still listening to feedback about this change. It relies a lot on Attack-speed.
   
7. Silk Edge
   This Sub-archetype also relies on Defense piercing to scale, transmuting your base power and power multiplier into Defense piercing. It was relatively weak prior to 0.9.1.3 buff, and it should be more viable now. It is recommended to use this archetype with other damage archetypes to help clear the weak enemies and let defense shredding kill the strongest ones.

I try to make sure all of the archetypes are worth it, with both upsides and downsides, so they are situational and not always optimal.
For example, Blood Transmutation or Metal transmutation are weaker in Glass bone challenges compared to raw damage or faith build, for example.



Like many games, balancing is not just about buffing things up when they are weak; sometimes, you also have to make the hard decision of nerfing things that are just too good. I try to nerf things only when it's necessary.

Overall, my approach to deciding if I need to nerf something is that I ask myself 2 questions: How strong is it? How easy/hard is it to obtain?

If something is easy but not as strong, then it's fine too; it may need a bit of tweaking, but usually, it doesn't need nerfing.

If something is strong but also hard to obtain, then I think it's fine to keep it slightly too strong at the price of making it harder to obtain.
Death scythe is an example of it; it is by far the strongest weapon of the game, basically making any number of HP points a detail due to it either one-shotting smaller monsters or removing %HP of the strongest monsters.
However, I also have to make sure it doesn't completely invalidate other things to not make the game a race to obtain this one thing that wrecks absolutely everything.
(which is also why the most optimal way to reach infinity now uses cleaver instead of Death scythe as it's a very hard weapon to obtain now)

If something is both strong and easy to obtain, then it very likely needs a nerf. Complete and perfect immortality also falls into that category.
A recent example of this is the Throwing knife during the 0.9 Update, which was both very strong (high damage output), easy to obtain (it was a weapon you can obtain right at the beginning), and even given immortality (keeping dash button pressed).



Small adjustments that I want to make in the near future include a slight nerf to the necromancer and a minor buff to the lava titan to smooth out the difficulty curve.


When the game first released, the OST wasn't well-received, and I often received feedback that it felt off.
It wasn't an easy decision, but based on this feedback, I decided to look for another composer to work with.
In the end, I collaborated with 3 composers on the "new OST" (though there are still 2 small tracks left from the previous composer as I believe they fit the game very well).

So far, the feedback on the new OST has been very positive, with even negative reviews appreciating the game's OST despite criticisms of the game itself.

Discussions with the composers and iolaCorp have started about selling the OST on Steam.
The goal is to have the composers receive a revenue share from the sale of the OST to please everyone and also allow players who wish to support the composers.

Additionally, I've started uploading the game's OST to YouTube for anyone to listen to.









In the comments of the 0.9.1 release post and in the previous blog post, I've seen many players eagerly awaiting the 1.0 release of the game.
While I know this is a good sign that many players feel like the game is getting into a good state for 1.0, I want to remind everyone that there is still one major update to land before that.

I don't want to give an exact release date as nothing is certain as of now. An optimistic prediction would be July/August, but it's likely to be later.

I initially wanted the Early Access to only last 1 year, but the amount of things I ended up adding (and want to add) to the game greatly went beyond my expectations.
Nothing major changed in the general plan for updates, so I think it's still fine in the end.


While development hasn't started yet, I want to begin actively working on it during the second half of February. I want to address the last big/medium issues that have been reported so far, and then focus on advancing the game again.
0.10 will focus on enabling weapon modifiers, introducing a new variant for the second zone, as well as the 5th zone, which will likely require a lot of work too.


I've been very hesitant to add equipment, but I think it'll be worth spending around 1 week during the 0.10 beta to experiment with equipment. I'll make a branch for it for players who wish to try out the equipment system and gather feedback.
Based on the feedback, I may want to push the equipment system to completion or completely scrap the idea for good.


Another thing that I wish to do, but more likely for 1.0 than for 0.10, is a small rework of the talent system.
The idea would be to create a small upgrade tree for each talent, where each talent gains 1 upgrade point when they level up.
The idea is to make talent upgrading a bit more interesting, adding a bit of choice in the way talents are upgraded, and maybe even making active talents lean toward either more passive or active upgrades.
In addition, this would make the unlocks of other talents easier to understand since I could simply add a node that unlocks the next tier of a talent.

This is just an idea I'm exploring since a few day, but I believe it could be a good addition without denaturing the game. That will depend on how much time I want to spend into it

Search for "Tangled Crisis" on Steam. Hit that Wishlist button and follow our broadcast throughout Steam Next Fest.

Watch the devs play through a few levels, showcasing action from both up close in 3rd person, and from the traditional top down view. We also show the neighborhood hub, where you can upgrade your heroes and towers, and progress non-linearly through a variety of levels.

Dear player
Thank you for your support of "Storm Swordsman"!
In order to run smoothly for all players, the game will change from 60FPS to 30FPS mode.
This will solve the problem of unsmooth running for most players.
I wish you a happy game, thank you.

1.The game is changed to 30FPS mode
2. Added trial version of DEMO

1. Fixed the error that "Shizune" and "Taki" could still speak after death.
2. The number of jump button detection frames is increased to 2 frames
3. When holding down the RB skill key, you can no longer jump.


twitter : https://twitter.com/shiouhuamien

Discord : https://discord.com/invite/ZqHsJht

Version 0.7 is coming along nicely and this week I added 2 more buildings into the steel tier; the Steel Boiler and the Quarry. The steel boiler serves as as an upgrade to the iron boiler that has higher energy output and improved efficiency. It can be found relatively early on in the steel tier and does not even require Mechanical pack 2 to be unlocked so you can start to power more things in the pursuit of steel production and science. The quarry come in a little later and serves as the mining machine for the steel tier. It can mine out a volume of 15x15x300 over 60,000 blocks. It is not the fastest taking over 18 hours to do so but they should provide you with a nice steady stream of resources. The design of the Quarry is heavily inspired from the BuildCraft Quarry and moves and extends to each block it is mining. I am sure the visual design will change eventually but for now getting it working was the most important part. For now Quarries run off of solid fuel for power this is only temporary and they will run off electricity once it is introduced. There are a few more pieces of steel machinery that will hopefully be added in the next week or so including the steel pump and steam engine.

Version 0.7 is getting close to its release and hopefully will be there in about 2 weeks.

Reminder that there will be an AMA (Ask me anything) in the official discord on the 24th of February at 3pm Eastern if you want to stop by and ask me how many twinkies I am tall or anything else that strikes your fancy.

Also if you enjoy playing Engineer Alpha and want to see its development continue far into the future you can support the game on Patreon and you get access to exclusive content. There was recently a post about Nuclear Reactors and there will be another soon about Electricity.

ver.1.06
・陣形「ケバルライ」の号令効果が全ターン適用されていた不具合の修正

Hey everyone,

It's been a while since the Co-op playtest update back in September last year and some of you have been wondering about the status of the game, so I wanted to provide a little update post to show what's been under development. Rest assured that the game is constantly being worked on and tons of new things are being added as it prepares for Early Access release!

Caves will be an important piece of the game's story with resources, creatures and other things to find. They are completely randomly generated using a voxel-type system, and so the resulting cave networks can truly be breathtaking. Just make sure you have enough fuel for your torch.








With the water in caves and a general need for this feature for a long time, swimming has finally been added, allowing you to access more areas both aboveground and below.




Something that has been on the list for a while, a grid-based inventory allows for more detailed inventory management with a greater ability to carry many small items with less large ones, rather than a one slot per item approach before.




Reworked the terrain generation to fully embrace large elevation changes to add more dramatic and realistic looking terrains.












Finally adding a proper fire starting system that needs the right amount kindling, tinder and fuel to make things more immersive.




More immersive item placement animations, small tree chopping animation, etc. make the game feel more alive.







These are just some of the new things added to the game. A lot of cool new features and content are planned for the Early Access release to make sure the game is as solid as can be for launch. Stay tuned for further updates and a final potential playtest round right before release!

Get notified when the playtest is live again, sign up for the email list at the bottom of this page: https://thelastplague.com/