Mortal Rite News

[h2]Greetings All![/h2]

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Round Toast Studios is thrilled to announce that Mortal Rite, our highly anticipated co-op multiplayer soulslike, is now available in Early Access!

Mortal Rite has been a passion project for our team, inspired by our desire to make a game that we ourselves would want to play for hours and hours. We appreciate the feedback and support we’ve already gotten from the community in our development process, and we can’t wait to march into Early Access with you all!



Mortal Rite is a very close project to our heart, and for that, we want to send our gratitude towards our Kickstarter backers, our dedicated Discord community, and everyone who has supported us or our silly social media videos along the way.

This release is just the beginning, with tons of new features, characters, levels, enemies, items, and improvements yet to come as we continue to optimize the game with your feedback.

Now, let's jump into some of the coolest features that we are excited about in Mortal Rite.



Our goal from the start of development has always been to make a game where you can progress solo or in co-op seamlessly, and because we are a 5-man studio, we designed Mortal Rite to allow for up to 5-player co-op.

It has been a challenge to make levels that work for both one player and five, and you will notice some changes to the level if you load up with a bigger squad, but we have worked very hard to make Mortal Rite a souls-like that is fun in co-op, and we can’t wait for your feedback during Early Access to make it even better!



Our goal with Mortal Rite is to combine that difficult yet strategic combat of a souls-like game with the hero classes of some Rogue-Lites, where you can easily switch characters for a completely different combat experience! Within each character are also two different fighting stances that can be mixed and matched with different abilities to suit your playstyle!



Our goal has been to make fast & responsive melee combat with an emphasis on breaking enemy posture to interrupt attacks. We also have a bit of a unique approach on chaining together different attacks seamlessly, as characters have different light, heavy, and charge attacks.

We also give the players more options in combat, allowing them to adapt to different enemies by utilizing unique sprinting, dodging, and air attacks. Each character also has their own specialty of parrying, deflecting, or blocking.



We’ve made a wide variety of aggressive enemies, each with different methods of taking the player down.

Also, factions influence fights. With factions being hostile to each other, players can force enemies to fight each other instead. We believe that this creates a better gameplay experience and more options for different builds within each character! Many more enemies will be coming during Early Access through free updates as well!

[h3]▶️Don't forget to check out our -10% release discount[/h3]
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1655990/Mortal_Rite/

Finally, We hope you enjoy everything Mortal Rite has to offer in Early Access. Thank you for joining us on this journey!

~ Round Toast Studios

[h3]The countdown is on!

Tomorrow, Mortal Rite launches worldwide, bringing challenging, souls-like combat to players across the globe.

Check the map for your local release time, and get prepared!

Are you ready to prove yourself?✌️[/h3]



[h3]▶️Check out the System Requirements[/h3]

[h2]Greetings everyone![/h2]

The day we all have been waiting for is finally here. Mortal Rite's official release date for early access is November 7th. 🎉

Mark your calendars and stay tuned for some exclusive events and rewards.

Here is a quick teaser from our release trailer to give you a taste.👇

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▶️ Don't forget to add Mortal Rite to your wishlist so you get notified when launch!.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1655990/Mortal_Rite/

see ya’ll in a few.😉

~ Round Toast Team

One of the main things that we’ve had in mind since the beginning was multiplayer. When we first started testing multiplayer , we quickly found out that balancing enemies for multiple players needed multiple approaches to make it engaging.

Just scaling enemy health wasn’t enough, as it felt artificially difficult. Enemies felt oddly tanky, even the lost souls, who were relatively easy to kill. So Jensen came up with a way to adjust how enemies should feel not just based on health, but across many things at once.

So lets dive into how these things affect the experience for the player.

[h2]Health[/h2]
Scaling an enemies health depends on their class. We can scale a Lost Soul to go from 2-3 attacks gradually to 4-7 attacks depending on how many players are in the session. Its not a large increase, but it makes a difference when there are more of them, and your usual attacks, leave them just barely alive.

In contrast, enemies that are meant to take a lot of damage, like the Heavy Archer, scales their health much more. They move and attack slowly, and considering that many players can attack them at once, they should be able to take a significant amount of punishment before finally going down.

[h2]Poise[/h2]
A character’s poise determines how much physical force they can withstand before they poise-break and get locked into a hit-reaction. The difference in poise varies greatly between each enemy class. So lets compare two enemies:

[h3]Lost Soul[/h3]

• Total Poise: 2

• 2-3 Light attack break poise
  
• 1-2 Heavy attacks break poise
  
• 1 Charged Attack breaks poise

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ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤWeak Enemy – Light Attacks

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ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤWeak Enemy – Heavy Attacks

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ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤWeak Enemy – Charge Attack

We don’t scale this for multiplayer, as it feels odd to have the weakest enemy in the game suddenly able to withstand incredibly strong attacks.

[h3]Cultist Knight[/h3]

• Total Poise: 5
• 6-10 Light attack break poise
  
• 2-5 Heavy attacks break poise
  
• 2-3 Charged Attack breaks poise

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ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤStrong Enemy – Light Attacks

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ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤStrong Enemy – Heavy Attack

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ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤStrong Enemy – Charge Attack

Since the player can almost never break their poise in a single attack, we’re free to scale their poise slightly per player that joins. This means that players piling up on this one stronger enemy becomes less effective as they can now respond to being overwhelmed.

[h3]Damage[/h3]
We’re pretty careful with how much we scale damage, as we don’t want to always have the player at risk of dying from a single attack, but it does scale slightly with multiplayer to account for the increased player count. Right now its around a 5% increase per player. Not a lot, but should add up over the course of fighting multiple enemies.

[h3]Enemy Behavior[/h3]
Enemies are constantly checking to see how they should respond to a players actions, and one of the things they can check, is not only how many players are around, but how close they are. So if players decided to swarm a a single enemy, they can respond by triggering a unique skill for when they’re surrounded. The Sword Knight will do a sweeping attack all around to try and hit all nearby players. or if they’ve taken too much damage too quickly, they build up a pulse of magic to knockdown anyone nearby.

This isn’t limited to just swarming though, they can even change tactics based on the specific character that they’re targeting. For instance, Lost Souls aren’t particularly fond of being being absolutely pummeled by Shold, so they tend to dodge around more if they see him.

In addition, Enemies have one more trick up their sleeve in multiplayer. If an enemy kills a player they become empowered, healing for a portion of the damage that they’ve taken, and gaining a damage buff until they’re killed. This means that any enemy can potentially become a significant threat if players are dying often.

That’s all for this week, catch y’all next time.

Last time we covered some of the design decisions on why we swapped to the stance system. Today we’ll focus on Fia and some of the changes this made to her kit. Fia’s two stances are Battlemage and Flameborne. When in Battlemage stance, she primarily focuses on Melee attacks and supplementing those with useful spells, both offensively and defensively.



While she previously used to be able to pick from a pool of abilities, we found that players didn’t really deviate from the main damaging ones, because it wasn’t clear that the other spells had any real advantages.

Splitting them up into 2 separate stances that you can toggle between frees them up to be able to choose when they want to use situational abilities, and when they want to burst their target down.

This also allowed us to expose more of the underlying systems in the form of passive abilities. We’ve developed the poise and focus systems quite a bit between all of the characters, and this lets players be able to have more control over those systems.

For example, Fia used to be able to use her defensive ability to be able to parry anything in the game, but that didn’t feel quite right, when she got hit by a massive attack from a boss, and deflected it with the same ease as Shold, who was made to be able to block anything. So we introduced a threshold where she can still successfully deflect any attack, but if it’s too strong, she still gets knocked down, but takes no damage. Players can now choose to spend a point in increasing the defensive power she has when defending, or optionally just choose to dodge that attack.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ Failing deflect against large enemies

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ Now we can deflect

In addition, you can really go all in on defense if you so choose, by adding an ignition effect when defending that will burn anyone you defend against, and significantly increase your focus generation when you successfully deflect an attack, letting you immediately start casting an offensive spell.

We’ve tried to take this kind of approach for all of the passives, where we either expose previously hidden systems or we add extra components to let you really customize how you want to play the character.

Along with the passives, there were new spells that were made for each stance, with the goal of supporting the overall playstyle for that stance.

The Battlemage stance received a new Fire Cone ability that can deal significant close range damage in a wide area. This can be expanded to increase the range or to stun enemies caught in it.

The Flamesword spell is now fully featured as well, offering an option to upgrade from fast kicks to dedicated heavy and charged swings with the sword. These attacks have been designed with enemy groups in mind, so its a good choice to deal with large groups, instead of using the dagger.

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The Flameborne stance is still under heavy development, but at the moment, you can enter this stance at any time, and begin to burn your focus pool, but your abilities don’t cost anything.

Fia’s Light attacks are replaced with a Fireshard combo and heavy attacks cast a chargeable fireball, significantly increasing damage with each charge level (up to 3.)

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That’s all for this week. Catch ya later✌️