ENTER, WAYWARD SOUL
Welcome back to our second monthly Rogue Fortune devlog, where we dive behind the scenes of the Well of Eternal Riches and unpack the discoveries September held for us. Have you got your healing phials ready?
ON FAMILIAR SANDS
Let’s start with a continuation from one of last month’s updates, where you may recall we were hard at work designing the Well’s exterior and starting room. We even asked for some thoughts from you on what to call that above-ground camp, and your suggestions ranged from The Arca to The Hole™️ — don’t ever forget the trademark.
We’ll be deliberating on that a while longer, but for now have a peek at some of the visual evolution these lovely spaces have made this month - including new decor, blockouts and water rendering effects...
THE ROAD TO RELICS IS PAVED WITH GOOD CONTENT
Relics and inventory management are a core puzzle piece in what makes Rogue Fortune tick. In early design phases we were really inspired by the spatial tactics of Dredge, Backpack Hero and Backpack Battles, and fell in love with how adjacency impacted your abilities. Whilst our core design and mechanics have been getting built in, we’ve not really touched on what relics look like... until now.
A whole bunch of the team contributed to the design and concepting of our first Relic collection, including producers and QA. We’re a real mixed bag of talents here, so we love getting to cross-pollinate our skills where it matters. All through September, Stef and Ine have been locked in on sculpting colour-boxed assets of these Relic designs in 3D, and it’s made such a huge difference to playing the game already.
From blank blocks of ancient Tetris, to oddities and oobles oozing with personality. We still have a lot more to go, so expect many more updates to come. Do you have any favourites from this batch?
ARROWS AND ARTHROPODS
But that’s not all our artists have been cooking. Fran’s sketched out a new enemy we’re nicknaming the Wormer, who portals around the room and shoots out AOE attacks.
Wormer? I hardly know ‘er!
Whilst the wormy boy is in super early stages, Stef has been expanding our collection of traps and obstacles; including new arrow launcher designs. We already have environmental beetle traps that spout fire at you, so continuing Stef’s favoured theme of gilded creepie crawlies are these beauties:
Initially we explored a snake, which got beefed into a cobra to be a bit more threatening, but then decided... why break from bug?
It’s been through a number of iterations and concepts now, including centipede, grubs, mandibles and horns for fire and crystal variants, and it’s still not quite final but it is very very cool - and we reckon you’ll think so too!
FREEDOM OF MOVEMENT
A project Jen and Tristan, our programmer-designer dream team, have been absolutely marinating on has been the elusive Animation Refactor. What that actually means... goes way over my head, so here it is in their own words:
“We refactored all the animation because what we’d built previously was a complex system for a game that actually needed something far simpler, more streamlined.
The combat pillar that we’re working towards is that combat is the canvas for the core USP. The Relics and their active effects should be what shine in the game; and the combat and the way the animations work from attack to attack, action to action, are really just the foundation for all these powerful effects to go do funky cool things.”
“It was a big switch taking the player character from state-based logic - which allowed fancy transitions but limited how fast you could react - to trigger-based logic that lets any anim switch to any other anim on demand. We also reworked the attack anim logic so that they're not weapon-specific; any weapon can use any attack anim, so we don't need to swap weapon anim sets at runtime.
The refactor allows us to have much faster combat in Rogue Fortune, and makes anims much easier to maintain and adjust. The player can now instantly use multiple melee weapons during gameplay (the regular melee weapon and a special melee weapon), attack rapidly, exit attacks early, and dash into and out of attacks.”
THE REST OF THE STUFF
And in the words of Billy Mays: "But wait, there's more!"
September really had a lot going on, so let’s quickfire that we:
Designed new shield abilities and VFX
Started overhauling the placeholder inventory blockout
Continued refining Relic & abilities UI
Refined sound effects for various enemy and player special attacks
Built and implemented new railing for our first biome
Began concepting our third biome in earnest
And finally chose a flying fire enemy design!
It was a truly jam-packed month, so we hope you’ve enjoyed hearing about it much as we did making it happen.
Just remember that Rogue Fortune is in active development - so, much as we love the sauce we’ve been working hard on, changes can always happen here and there if we need to rework the recipe to really make it perfect!
Let us know your favourite update from September, or what you want to see next; and let’s find out what October has in store soon!
And don’t forget to WISHLIST NOW, or Stef’s gonna set a centipede on you... probably.