Oct 15

You Are the Lord of Ravage. Nothing Else Matters

The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante - Magnificat

Lords of Ravage is now available on Steam! In this dark tactical RPG with roguelike elements from Synthetic Domain and 101XP, you stand on the side of evil. Step into the role of the mighty Lord of Ravage: command your minions, devise sinister tactics, crush your enemies in turn-based battles, and seek the artifact that could alter the fate of the world.

Lords of Ravage features:

A tactical RPG where you embody pure evil. Become the Lord of Ravage and lead your minions to conquer kingdoms in deeply strategic turn-based combat.
Three unique campaigns. Play as the ruthless warrior Berold, the witch-sorceress Zavrys, or the demoness Azneya. Each character has their own story, motivations, and devastating combat style.
Meaningful choices and consequences. Conquer regions and decide who to spare or burn to a crisp. Your actions affect the Threat Level — the higher it gets, the fiercer the heroes' resistance will be.
Faction and skill combinations. Build your army from minions of various factions, upgrade their stats, equip them with artifacts, and unleash ancient Decrees to leave your enemies no chance of survival.
Adaptive enemies. Face off against heroes of different classes and with varying abilities. They learn, adapt, and will stop at nothing to bring you down.
Pixelated 2.5D aesthetics. Dark fantasy comes alive through stylish visuals with expressive effects and atmospheric designs.
Highly replayable single-player experience. Procedurally generated events, character progression, artifact collection, and multiple paths through the campaign make each playthrough genuinely unpredictable.

If you already have The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante in your collection and would like to try our new game, we’ve prepared a special bundle just for you! Purchase Lords of Ravage at a great price and enjoy our games!

https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/60292/Ravage_and_SufferingLords of Ravage isn't just a game about destruction — it's your chance to forge a dark vision of power, crush the forces of good, and become the true Lord of Ravage. Destroy, devastate, conquer… Let disobedient kingdoms burn.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1830320

Oct 15

Quick Development Update | Dev Blog 3

Streets of Rogue 2 - George (Antishyr) | tinyBuild

Hi, Rogues,

Antishyr here, the community manager of Streets of Rogue 2. It's about time we brought you some news on how the development is going. I sat down with the game's solo programmer/designer, Matt Dabrowski, to chat about what he's been up to lately, and here's the result: a miscellaneous bunch of developments that are either happening right now or have recently been completed. Expect this devblog to be slightly shorter than the two previous ones, as this one is less visually rich and is meant to give the community an idea of where SoR 2 is at currently.

Note from Matt: Please bear in mind that anything and everything you read here is subject to change. Some of the specific design elements you'll see here have been planned for a long time, but haven't gotten much (if any) implementation work until fairly recently. Good games are built on strong foundational systems, and it's taken a long time to get those foundations in place, but I think it was worth it! My intention has always been to make my game systems super flexible and easy to mess with. In fact, I'm planning to allow a large number of my "official" design decisions to be totally subverted with the mutators system. It's entirely possible that some of the design elements below just won't work out. But that's what pre-Early Access and Early Access is for!

🎮 DEMO UPDATE WHEN?

First things first, I'm fully aware you've been expecting an update for the demo for some time now. I happen to have a quick update on this front for you: Matt's planning on delivering the next version as soon as the demo is, quoting him, "a much better representation of the core gameplay loop that I'm currently working toward for the Early Access release."

🎨 DESIGN IMPLEMENTATION & BALANCE

❓ What is Design implementation?
Speaking of gameplay, you may've seen a section called "Design Implementation & Balance" on our Development Roadmap:

You probably understand what balance is, but might ask, "Just what the hell does 'Design Implementation' mean exactly?" In short, it's about writing code for elements of the game's design that are not yet in the game. Example: Matt has designed a whole system of Mayors controlling cities across the world, and the player must take those guys (or gals!) down to gain influence and eventually attempt to topple the President. In order for the whole process to play out, however, you need to have all the elements in place:

The Mayor's dwelling must have several floors and function as a dungeon.
Mayors will come in different varieties—e.g., a cultist mayor who has a massive following (and does podcasts every now and then) or a sewer-dwelling cannibal mayor whose primary source of protein is another NPC's body.
Each of those city boss types must have their own unique dialogue, types of quests they dole out, etc.
Methods of taking down the Mayor or gaining their favor (and the repercussions for these) are intended to be quite varied. SOR1 offered a glimpse at this, but SOR2 will take the system much further.

...and so on.

It sounds like a lot, but thankfully, the game's infrastructure was built to allow for gameplay systems like these to be implemented quickly and rapidly iterated upon.

A dungeon under the Mayor's house; level editor

A dungeon under the Mayor's house; in-game

⚰️ Death Penalty
"What's the penalty for death?" has been on Matt's mind for a while as one of the most crucial design/balance dilemmas. The goal is to avoid making kicking the bucket too punishing (running halfway across the city to your corpse to retrieve lost items in a dangerous area is unlikely) while keeping the stakes high enough to maintain tension. There are always players who demand the difficulty to pack more of a punch, and those who just want to chill. Mutators that tweak the conditions will be meant to solve this.

💼 Professions
Another outstanding item on the dev agenda at the moment is profession specialization. In the first game, the Hacker, in addition to stealthily fiddling with computers, could actually put up a decent fight if the situation demanded it. With the sequel, the story will be different—picking a fight while playing as a weak character won't be as viable of an option. But, the game will offer more varied ways to improve your system breaching skills, as well as new skills you can acquire via augmentation booths. Essentially, it'll be more important to actually role-play!

🌎 WORLD TIER SYSTEM

Another important aspect that's being fleshed out as we speak is region difficulty tiers. Think of these tiers like a typical RPG system that includes higher-level monsters, weapons and armor in higher-level regions, but applied broadly to a bunch of different types of skills and aspects of the game world that may not necessarily be combat-oriented. To give a general example, if you've picked a Hacker and your skills are currently around tier 2, cracking a tier 3 security system might be achievable but quite tough. Or, a tier 8 police station might flat-out refuse to assign missions to your tier 4 Cop character due to being underqualified.

So, how will region tiers be determined? That's still up in the air; Matt is leaning toward a ruleset similar to one Skyrim utilizes. Each region is given a range of tiers—for example, a region has a range of tiers from 5 to 10. If you enter for the first time when your character is below tier 5, the region locks its level to 5, and you'll probably have a tough time unless you improve your character first. If you enter for the first time when your character is tier 7, the region will lock itself to tier 7 or 8, giving you a tier-appropriate challenge. And if you enter when your character is above tier 10, the region would lock to tier 10, and you'd have an easy time. This is oversimplifying it a bit, and this approach to difficulty may not even pan out to Matt's liking, but we'll see how it goes!

It's worth adding that the game world is planned to be dynamic—as the player, you'll shape it by your actions. Random events occurring every now and then will impact factions and mayoral standings. All of this could potentially impact a region's difficulty regardless of its initially assigned difficulty tiers.

🖥️ OPTIMIZATION

High RAM usage has been one of Matt's primary concerns when it comes to SoR 2's performance. The higher volume of art used in the sequel compared to the first game gradually resulted in the game using up to a crazy 11 GB of RAM (Thank you to all those who reported this issue). It needed to be addressed ASAP, and thankfully Matt has been able to reduce this to about half its previous size by improving asset handling in the Unity engine. Further improvements will likely come at a later point, but for now we think it's down to an acceptable level.

🎨 BUG FIXES

Everpresent. Don't get us wrong here, we don't want to fix every single bug before shipping the Early Access version. But the most likely candidates for fixing will fall into two categories: It breaks the game in a not-fun way, or it's super noticeable and ridiculous. NPCs getting out of bed and immediately getting stuck between the bed and their wall would fall into this category. If that's ever happened to you in your personal life, you're probably aware that it's a terrible way to start your day. In addition to that, Matt's addressed a pesky problem where the game wouldn't start properly sometimes, but instead would load up one of your save files with dozens of MB of garbage data. Not a good call, video game.

As always, we appreciate your support! Share your thoughts on the devblog below and wishlist/follow Streets of Rogue 2 to stay up to date with the news:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2165810/Streets_of_Rogue_2/
Read previous dev blogs:
Devblog I: Vehicles
Devblog II: Chunks

Watch video devlogs:
Devlog 1: How I Approach World-Building? 🌎
Devlog 2: Creating an Open World Solo 🗺️
Devlog 3: Games That Inspired SoR 2 💡
Devlog 4: New Release ETA, Roadmap 🗺️

Join the community on Discord:
🔗DISCORD

Follow Streets of Rogue 2 on social media:
🔗TWITTER (X)
🔗TIKTOK
🔗BLUESKY
🔗YOUTUBE
🔗REDDIT

Oct 15

Development Update + New Demo Available

Explorers of Esmar - TipriGames

Hey everyone!

I’ve been working hard in the past months on some big improvements for Explorers of Esmar, and I’m excited to share what’s new. This update focuses on making battles more strategic, the world more nice to look at, and the game overall smoother to play — and you can try some of it right now in the updated free demo.

NEW BATTLE SYSTEM

Combat in Esmar has evolved quite a bit!
You can now garrison soldiers inside your towers to provide them with various buffs depending on the soldier type. Positioning also plays a bigger role — units on higher ground gain advantages in attack strength.

Behind the scenes, I’ve also reworked how territory is calculated, which should make borders feel fairer and more dynamic around contested territory.

IMPROVED MAP GENERATOR

The terrain algorithm got a major overhaul. The world now generates plateaus and varied elevations, adding more depth (literally!) to maps.

I’ve also added climate variation, so you’ll now find snowy regions, temperate areas, and hotter zones. These might affect the fertility and productivity of farms in the future.

NEW BUILDINGS

To support deeper strategy and resource management, there are two new buildings:

Tannery — produces new materials and supports your economy.
Outpost — helps secure distant territory and expand your influence.

I’ve also reworked the build menu to make construction smoother and easier to navigate.

The plan is to introduce new late/mid game materials for building and production which can't be used right from the start.

PLAYER PROFILE

You can now create a player profile with a custom name and icon which will appear throughout the ingame UI and also on the flags on your towers! It’s a small addition, but it makes the experience feel more personal.

UI UPDATES

I’ve added advanced graphics settings, so you can adjust texture and model quality depending on your hardware.

There’s also a new statistics UI for a clearer overview of your settlements and economy, plus a few interface tweaks to make gameplay flow better. These are still work-in-progress.

UPDATED DEMO AVAILABLE NOW

The demo has been fully updated with all these new features, systems, and visuals. (But there are still some limitations of course!)

If you haven’t tried Explorers of Esmar yet, or if it’s been a while, now’s a great time to jump in and see how far the game has come.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3659320/

WHAT'S NEXT?

I’m still developing Explorers of Esmar solo, and your feedback really helps me prioritize what to work on next. This update was a big step toward refining the core gameplay loop and world generation.

Thanks so much to everyone who’s played the demo, left comments, or wishlisted the game — it really keeps me going.