Roguebook News

By now, everyone in the PLAYTESTER tier and above should have received their Closed Beta invites. If you haven’t - check your Kickstarter messages, or your email inbox.

Closed Beta has officially begun!

The Closed Beta is the first time anyone is able to play the new Roguebook client we have been working on all this time, with your support.

Closed Beta opened late last week, and the feedback so far has been pretty good.



Read the full Kickstarter Update here...

We are excited to announce that we are partnering with our friends at Nacon in releasing Roguebook!

We’ve been anxious to share this for a while now, but as you can probably guess these sorts of things take time to work out. Well, it's finally worked out.

If you haven’t already seen it, make sure to watch the announcement today on Nacon Connect. Thank you, Nacon!



Nothing changes! While we will receive help with publishing the game, Roguebook will be developed exactly as we described on the Kickstarter. Our work continues as usual. It’s important to us that we maintain creative freedom in whatever project we work on, and we know that’s what you would expect from us. Nacon has proven to be perfect for us in these regards, and we’re happy to be working with them.

We’ll have a lot more news to share about Roguebook soon, but in general here are some quick updates:

• The final version of the game is close to the first draft of its playable state
  
• Work on the prototype has ceased, and there have been quite a few interesting updates we haven’t shared yet
  
• Our animations are looking really cool.
  

Anyway, thank you for continuing to follow our project development and supporting us.

Talk to you again soon! Remember, you can always join our official Discord server to ask us a question.

• Team Abrakam
  

Today we are deploying our next major update for the Alpha version of Roguebook. We are nearing the end of our major updates for the Alpha client as we prepare the real “beta” with all the fancy bells and whistles.

We’ve teased what we’ve been working on for this update earlier this year, but a few things have changed since then. This is also why it’s arrived a little later than planned. Sorry about that.

This isn’t just a content update, but a major overhaul of some core designs in the game.

We’ve done a good bit of internal testing and tweaking to the point where we think we are ready for the public to test it. That’s you!

Without further ado, here are the patch notes for the Major March update:





We’ve completely overhauled the bonuses you get when increasing the amount of cards in your deck.

The idea behind talents, and deck rewards in general, are to incentivize the gathering of cards and creation of large decks, rather than min/maxing your deck into a very specific build that performs only one function.

How our talents work:

There are six tiers of Talents, each unlocked at a certain amount of cards in your deck.

Talent Tier Thresholds: 15, 20, 25, 30, and 35 cards

Each talent tier gives you the choice between 3 talents: (1 neutral talent, 1 for hero A, 1 for hero B).

Available talents are selected randomly from a pool. This is so that whenever you start a new run, you can’t stick to a “preferred build” which would dictate your drafting experience too much.



Introducing… Allies!

Or to put it in a less exciting way, equipment cards have been rethemed as allies.

The origin of this change was thematic. We felt that relics and equipment were too conceptually close. We also wanted to take advantage of the broad range of creatures in Faeria lore that could be called on as interesting cards in Roguebook.

Mechanically, the big difference is that all allies have a certain amount of strength. This number can influence a wide range of things, from the strength of their abilities to how much damage they do when attacking.

Some allies attack, some allies do not. Some allies are Goki.





With this update, we are introducing six new maps to Roguebook, two for each chapter. The old maps are gone.

The big reason for this is that we have totally changed the basic design concept behind map exploration. Previously, we had treated normal battles as ‘rewards’ that you need to seek and draft a card afterward. This lead to problems where some players would routinely skip battles because they felt too dangerous, even though we intended them to be both rewarding and fun.

Instead, we have decided to make normal battles mandatory by placing them in choke points, and removing the card draft award from them. They will still give you gold for defeating them, but really what you are looking for are the rewards hidden behind those fights.

Card drafts themselves are now additional map events you can find on their own.



Roads have been added to the game. For now, these are roughly implemented as brown tiles to move across - but will look much fancier in the future.

Roads do what you think they do - they allow you to move faster than normal. Generally, the best rewards will be off the beaten path and away from the roads.



We have updated the hero revival system to avoid issues where losing a character could be seen as a ‘positive’ thing to happen to you.

This is what happens now:

When a hero dies, all of its cards in your deck are transformed into “Revive Songs.”
You must play 3 of these cards in order to resurrect the hero, and transform their cards back to normal.
“Wound” cards are also added to your deck as before, but we have increased the amount to 3 after some testing.
All Wounds are removed from your deck after defeating a chapter boss.




Yes, we are changing the Hero Swapping system again!

This has proved to be one of the most difficult design challenges to overcome. We thought we had it solved with “whenever you play a card of a hero, that hero moves to the front”. We were wrong - it still felt off.

We’ve done a lot of internal testing on this front.

First, we tried disabling the auto-swapping and made a new keyword called “Heroic,“ which moves the hero to the front if it isn’t already. Basically, we keyworded the functionality from before. It felt better, but after testing we didn’t like that it’s easy to forget that card X has Heroic or not. It was leading to fatal and frustrating mistakes. After a few weeks of playing with Heroic we then came to this idea: why not just say that all “Block” cards have Heroic?

So, that’s what we did.

Here is how swapping works now:

Whenever a hero plays a Block card, that hero moves to the front if it isn’t already.

That’s it. There are also some new keywords to compliment this new system.

• Ranged: Costs 1 less if this hero is in the back
  
• Melee: Costs 1 less if this hero is in the front
  
• Charge: Move this hero to the front
  

“Charge” is being used on very few cards, basically to let an aggressive hero like Sharra have ways to move the front and gain their benefits from being there.

Another new keyword is Aggressive. This is for allies only. An ally with Aggressive attacks at the end of your turn for a number equal to its strength.



Loads and loads of new cards, relics, and gems. We could list them all out, but so much has changed it is probably better you just play and see for yourself.

An important note is that, for this patch, we have limited hero selection to Sharra and Sorocco specifically. We know this isn’t as fun, but we decided it is much better right now to focus entirely on these heroes and expand their card base to a point that feels more like the final game. We’ll try to get Aurora and Seifer back in asap. Sorry for the wait!

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That’s about it! There are probably more changes we haven’t mentioned here, but so much has been adjusted it’s difficult for us to remember it all. We have been testing with Roads so long, for example, that we almost forgot they were new.

Anyway, enjoy the new build! Please let us know how it feels here, or in our official Discord channel.

It’s available now on Steam.

- Team Abrakam