The Slormancer News

Hello Everyone!

If you've missed the last Slormite Chronicles then here's a quick recap: We are currently working on Update 0.8 that will introduce Achievements, a Codex and various quality of life features regarding stats and mechanics to The Slormancer,

[h2]Update 0.8: Achievements and Codex[/h2]
You can read more about Achievements and Codex in our previous Slormite Chronicles. Quickly put, we're introducing over 200 Achievements and a Codex, detailing most mechanics, stats and game modes of The Slormancer.




[h2]Working on Performance[/h2]
Besides the Codex and Achievements, we wanted to work on one last thing for this Update before calling it ready: Since the beginning of our Early Access, The Slormancer has struggled with performance toward the endgame when using heavy builds against lots of enemies. And this has only gone worse since the release of The Great Forge and then even worse when we allowed to fight multiple waves at once, coming from multiple directions. So you guessed it, we've been working on Performance.

We're trying to get rid of any sort of slowdown or freeze and to maintain FPS at a good enough rate regardless of the situation you're in. Hopefully, this is our final work on performance, and once we're done, The Slormancer will be ready for 1.0 performance-wise.

I've recorded a Before / After using a VERY intensive build in which I have about 100% Critical Strike Chance and 50% Ancestral Strike Chance, resulting in lots of Ancestral Effects triggering on top of constant Burn ticks everywhere. I'm also using Echoes of Vilinis, which can be quite demanding (to say the least) when lots of Crits are occuring. It's quite a messy build yet it's much cleaner when it stops being a slideshow.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

We've done incredible improvements by reworking pretty much every script that are heavily used in combat, whether by your own Character and Skills or by Enemies. We've also changed the way the game is compiled, again gaining quite a bit of speed.

I'm happy to say that improvements are satisfying enough to the point that we now feel confident with the performances of the game. That being said, some very specific builds may still be slowing the game down, but these will now be easy to target and work on.

[h2]Release when?![/h2]
That's where we're at. At this point, it is safe to say that the 0.8 Update should be available before the end of March, unless we run into some big issues during our final tests.

We've been working on mostly technical stuff for the past month so this is not the most exciting Chronicle, and we don't have much to share. But we believe it's for the best!

Cheers!

Hello Everyone!

Today, I'd like to talk about our plan for 2024. We've layed down the last steps that should allow us to hopefully leave Early Access this year! Without further ado, let's break it down.

[h2]The 2024 Roadmap[/h2]


Here is our latest (and last) Early Access Roadmap.

Some steps have been removed while others have been changed:
We've removed "Enemies & Environment" along with the "5th Endgame Mode" that were in our previous Roadmap. The truth is that it does not feel necessary to consider the game as complete. Of course, we could keep adding stuff to The Slormancer but we feel that we have enough enemy diversity and enough environments for now. As for the 5th Endgame Mode, we believe that our 4th Endgame Mode called "The Warlords" will be more than enough to complete the gameplay loop we want for the game.

We believe that these additions would benefit the game so we may very well add them after the release in 1.0 but our current priority is to polish our game and get it out of Early Access.

As you may have noticed on the Roadmap, there should be 3 Major Updates leading to the release.

• Update: 0.8: Will introduce the Codex and the Achievements.
  
• Update: 0.9: Will introduce a lot of changes regarding Balance and Player's Experience based on all the feedback we've gathered this past few years.
  
• Update: 1.0: Will introduce the end to the Story, the fight against The Slormancer, The Warlords Endgame Mode, the Influence that will be tied to it along with a big batch of Legendary Items.
  

At first, we wanted The Warlords to come earlier but we decided that we needed to drop something big along with the 1.0 Release so The Warlords Update will actually sign the end of Early Access.
We will playtest it in Closed Beta just to make sure that everything works properly before the release.

There are a few key elements that will be worked on along with Update 0.8 and Update 0.9 such as:

• Performance.
  
• Massive Debugging.
  
• Translation.
  

We have a bunch of deadlines set up along the year and we'll quickly know whether we can make it for 2024 or not. Now that we're so close, better not mess up.

[h2]Update 0.8: The Encyclopedia Update[/h2]
[h3]The Codex[/h3]


We've been working pretty hard on this Update already: We're done with the Codex (see above) but we've also added a pretty neat little feature: Since some new players were lost when reading their Skills and Upgrades for the first time as to what stat does what, we've added an extra tooltip that explains all stats that are mentioned in said Skill or Upgrade. AND for seasoned players, it also displays the current value of the stat so that you don't have to move back and forth your inventory.

This should be really useful for everyone that doesn't quite understand how some of our stats work.



[h3]Achievements[/h3]
As for Achievements, we're almost done as well. The menu and most achievements are complete and we're currently sitting at more than 200 Achievements divided in about 700 steps.



About Steam Achievements: They will be available for the release of The Slormancer (for the 1.0 release). There should be around 50 to 70 Steam Achievements chosen among all the ingame Achievements. We believe that Achievements are a powerful tool to encourage players to return to the game and we would like for this to happen at the best time for the game which is when it leaves Early Access.

That being said, everything you unlock now with ingame Achievements will be synchronized with Steam Achievements as soon as they become available (you won't have to do them twice).

Regarding Steam, we will also introduce Badges, Emoticons, Cards, Wallpapers etc... with the release of the 1.0 release. These are ready aswell so we can give you a small preview.



As you can see, the "Big Features" of the update are almost complete and it is now time to work on some of the invisible stuff such as Performance and Bugs. I really want to take the time to take care of most of our Performance issues in the next couple of weeks.
So, no release date just yet for Update 0.8. It'll depend on how fast I'm able to fix Performance issues.

That's about it for now.
Cheers!

Hello everyone!

The Slorm Reapers Update (v.0.7.5) is now available!

[h2]New Slorm Reapers[/h2]

68 Slorm Reapers have been added into The Slormancer!
That's pretty much it.

Of the 68 Slorm Reapers, there are 40 Unique Slorm Reapers and 28 Evolutions.

This means that the Slorm Reapers Collection is now complete.
However, 2 of the new Slorm Reapers are currently locked behing unavailable content right now:

• Vengeance will be acquired once you defeat Ohm Agad.
  
• Altior will be acquired once you complete Adam Nostrus' Trials.
  

Some Advices to hunt Slorm Reapers:

1. Slorm Reapers are looted on Breaches (not enemies) so clearing Breaches is the way to go.
   
2. Rooms in The Slorm Temple count as Breaches.
   
3. Breaches from Story Missions can loot Slorm Reapers.
   
4. There are no Breaches in The Great Forge so you won't find Slorm Reapers there.
   
5. There is a hidden pity timer that guarantees a Slorm Reaper every 150 Breaches.
   

[h2]Various Additions[/h2]
We've added a couple of things that felt mandatory when working on this Update:

• Whenever a Skill resets its Cooldown Time due to a triggered effect, an animation will be played on its icon to clearly deliver the information.
  
• Legendary Items and Slorm Reapers tooltips can now be scrolled up / down.
  

[h2]Bugs & Performance[/h2]
[h3]Performance:[/h3]

• Crafting lots of Slormites / Slormelines will compute instantaneously and will no longer cause the game to crash / freeze.
  
• Opening FAT War Chests should no longer cause the game to crash / freeze.
  
  • Goldus can now drop in stacks of 100 000.
    
  • Slormite, Slormelines and Slormandrites will be packed based on their Tier / Rarity.
    
  • In the absence of a Loot Filter, Items will be gradually filtered out to prevent 100s+ of Items displayed on screen (granting Goldus instead). This will literally only activate if more than 100 Items of a specific rarity are about to spawn, and will never filter out Epic or Legendary Items.
    
  • Item Names will be shown once the War Chest has done distributing all its content to prevent unnecessary performance constraints.
    
  • Looting all the content of a FAT War Chest should be much faster overall.
    

[h3]Bugs Fixed:[/h3]

• Having the Primal Ancestral Stone in a Tier 1 Ancestral Legacy Slot should no longer cause a crash.
  
• Duplicating a currency should no longer be possible in the Material Tabs.
  

That's about it for now!
Cheers!

Happy New Year everyone!

Same as last year, this Chronicle will be a recap of the year 2023 for The Slormancer and we will take a look back at what's been done.

But first and foremost, let's talk about the Slorm Reaper Update that was supposed to be done (damn you, devs!). It turns out that verifying and debugging a hefty amount of 68 Slorm Reapers took us longer than anticipated. We also took some time off during the holidays, and were busy eating raclette for a few days.

There's still a degree of uncertainty regarding the release date. We have a few things to polish here and there, a few sound FX to add and still some Slorm Reapers that do not work the way we want. We're almost there but not quite. We're almost always regretting giving a release date too soon so I'm not giving any right now. Coming Soon is the best I can say.

Now onto the Recap.

Fun fact: You may not know this but we publish the Slormite Chronicles devlog every 6th of the month, which is the day The Slormancer was released (on April 6, 2021). Everytime we publish a Slormite Chronicles, the game gets one month older, and it is currently 2 years and 9 months old.

https://steamcommunity.com/games/1104280/announcements/detail/3648510249383787904
We started the year with Slormite Chronicles #21. A Chronicle similar to this one, with a roadmap for 2023, and it turns out that we did everything that we had planned. Yay! Moving to Slorm Reapers by the end of year was not planned but it is one of the most challenging part of the roadmap for us so we're happy to be (almost) done with it.

https://steamcommunity.com/games/1104280/announcements/detail/3677786821873442436
We then went on with Update #1: The Luxuriant Update Part II on January 30.
This Update introduced :

• 8 New Missions (Act 4)
  
• A New Ancestral Legacy Tier, adding 32 Ancestral Skills.
  
• An Increased Level cap to 70.
  
• Quality of Life for The Slorm Temple.
  

https://steamcommunity.com/games/1104280/announcements/detail/3645136358946943138
In Slormite Chronicles #22, we talked about the (mixed) feedback we got for Act 4 and our plan to fix things, and then talked about the upcoming rework on Controller Support.

https://steamcommunity.com/games/1104280/announcements/detail/3655271993680980796
Slormite Chronicles #23 was again about Controller Support and the numerous technical changes that were coming to the game in The Technical Update. We also talked about the new Environment and Enemies that we were working on.

https://steamcommunity.com/games/1104280/announcements/detail/3645137816263933584
Update #2, called The Technical Update, introduced a complete rework of the Controller. We had a growing playerbase on Steam Deck, and an unexpected amount of players using a controller so it was most needed. We also added numerous technical changes:

• A new Aim-Assist for Controller users.
  
• A Toggle Option along with various Visual Feedbacks for the Aim-Assist.
  
• Many Interface and Menu Navigation changes for the Controller.
  
• New Font Sizes
  
• Search Bars for Skills, Attributes and Slorm Reapers.
  
• New Bindable Buttons
  
• Uncapped FPS.
  
• UltraWide Support
  
• An ingame Zoom.
  

https://steamcommunity.com/games/1104280/announcements/detail/3696933459132056109
Slormite Chronicles #24 covered our upcoming Royal Wing environment along with 5 New Enemies.

https://steamcommunity.com/games/1104280/announcements/detail/6754877058971340034
This led to Update #3: The Royal Wing Update Part I on April 11 that introduced:

• 5 New Enemies
  
• A New Environment (The Royal Wing)
  
• A New Legendary Chest to store Legendary Items.
  
• Changes to Battlefield Expeditions: Now separated in two slightly different modes.
  
  • Battlefield Journey. With Bosses on dedicated Floors.
    
  • Careful Examination. With the ability to farm in a chosen Environment.
    

https://steamcommunity.com/games/1104280/announcements/detail/3719453992477321493
https://steamcommunity.com/games/1104280/announcements/detail/3721708329664648030
https://steamcommunity.com/games/1104280/announcements/detail/3644023772659391558

Slormite Chronicles #25, #26 and #27 were all about our biggest update of the year: The Royal Wing Update, Part II that would not only introduce new missions, story content but also loadouts and a rework of The Great Forge. The first iteration that we talked about in the Chronicles (#25) turned out to be something players didn't want so we went on with something simpler and funnier (#26) that seems to have pleased players.

https://steamcommunity.com/games/1104280/announcements/detail/6027549530047881897
This led to Update #4: The Royal Wing Update Part II on July 10 introducing:

• Act 5: 6 New Missions and 1 Boss fight.
  
• A new Ancestral Legacy Tier adding 20 new Ancestral Skills.
  
• Increased Level Cap to 80.
  
• Loadouts
  
• Reworks to:
  
  • Armor and Elemental Resistances, making them more efficient.
    
  • The Great Forge, making it faster, greedier and with a better density by introducing "Multi-Waving" along with opening more Spawn Locations at once (from 2, up to 6).
    
  • Silence, toning it down and making it only affect spellcasters.
    
  • Legendary Reinforcement, by limiting it to 15.
    
• And various changes to Runes or new player experience.
  

https://steamcommunity.com/games/1104280/announcements/detail/3685685238927988976
https://steamcommunity.com/games/1104280/announcements/detail/3690191375767913128

Slormite Chronicles #28 and #29 were about the upcoming Ancestral Update that would introduce Adam Nostrus Trials, a series of endgame goals that would guide the player to the right direction along with setting nice objectives, along with our first endgame boss: Adam Nostrus.
On top of that, we would introduce the Primal Ancestral Stone, a unique stone that you can enshrine anywhere on your Ancestral Legacy that would increase build possibilities a lot.

In one of the Slormite Chronicles, we also talked about our ideal goal for the end of the year, which was to release: The Ancestral Update, The Slorm Reaper Update (the one we're currently working on) and The Warlords Update. It was very optimistic to say the least. I would have loved to release The Slorm Reapers Update before the end of the year, just to get 2 out of 3, but there was no way that we could have done this one faster.

https://steamcommunity.com/games/1104280/announcements/detail/6819068581450405188
Update #5: The Ancestral Update was then released on September, 19th.
It introduced:

• Adam Nostrus' Trials.
  
• An endgame Boss: Adam Nostrus, King of Fashion.
  
• The last Tier of the Ancestral Legacy Tree adding 5 new Ancestral Skills.
  
• The Primal Ancestral Stone.
  

https://steamcommunity.com/games/1104280/announcements/detail/3749867242861566445
https://steamcommunity.com/games/1104280/announcements/detail/3774639576536488352
https://steamcommunity.com/games/1104280/announcements/detail/3860210510760624428
Since then, we've been working on Slorm Reapers! So we pretty much only talked about Slorm Reapers in Slormite Chronicles #30, #31 and #32.

In 2023, we have released 5 Updates. A 6th before the end of the year would have been great but we had to settle for 5. It was a great year for us overall, we checked a lot of important boxes and made good progress.

Once The Slorm Reapers Update is out, we will post our plan for 2024 in an upcoming Slormite Chronicles. along with an updated Road Map. We have high hopes for the year to come, so please stick with us for the final push!

That's about it for now!
And again, Happy New Year! May you all loot fat War Chests.

Cheers!

Hello everyone!

It's Chronicle time!

[h2]Slorm Reapers, again![/h2]
I feel like I'm only talking about Slorm Reapers lately in these Slormite Chronicles, but that's pretty much what this is what our daily lives are like. Slorm Reapers everyday, and night.

For those of you that have missed our latest Slormites Chronicles, we are currently working on finishing the whole Slorm Reapers Collection. As of now, there are currently 52 Slorm Reapers available in The Slormancer for a total of 120 wanted. This means 68 new Slorm Reapers to deliver.

The good news is that everything is coming along. We are slightly late on schedule but not by a big margin. This could have taken much more time than previously anticipated, so we're happy with how things are going. As for our current progress, at the time of writing this Chronicle, we are at:
- Pre-production and Brainstorm : 100% Complete
- Production (Actual Code) : 80% Complete
- Assets (Icons and Visual FX): 70% Complete
- Tests: Debug & Balance: 0% Complete

This means that we should be done relatively soon but I'm still reluctant to give a release window right now, mostly because Christmas holidays are coming up. And we want to make sure that we are fully available to fix bugs for at least a week once the update releases. We also don't want to release an update that may introduce gamebreaking bugs while the holiday sales is going on, since this would be a pretty bad experience for new players.

Basically, this means that we will probably aim for a release of this update slightly after Christmas, and possibly even slightly after the holidays, depending on how comfortable we are with our update.

That being said, we're close to finish quite a big milestone for The Slormancer, and for us. And we're pretty happy with how things are going. We're not sure about the impact of adding so many Slorm Reapers for our Early Access players, since most of you already have totally broken very viable builds with the weapons that already are in the game. But we're pretty confident that having so many different and unique weapons to choose from, level up, and discover will eventually pay off and hopefully be an important salespoint for the game.

[h2]Slorm Reapers, again![/h2]
Since we now have quite a bit of Slorm Reapers ready, I can finally show a bunch of screenshots of actual gameplay. It's not as efficient as videos but it's much faster to make, and it means that I will be able to return to coding Slorm Reapers soon enough.


The first screenshot is based on the notorious Vegetable Reaper. Tyler, the rabbit is there with you, eating vegetables.


This is the Slorm Reaper of the Desecrated Unholy Sepulcher: When killing enemies, they will drop a small sepulcher. You will then be able to either cast Tomb Explosion or Tomb Profanation on them.


Slorm Reaper of the Spider Nest, turning you into ... a spider knight.
On top of that, this Slorm Reaper makes your projectiles bounce off the edges of the camera instead of physical walls!

That's about it for today!
If you've missed the last Slormite Chronicles about Slorm Reapers, you can find them here, and there!

Cheers everyone!