SpellRogue News

Greetings Spellslingers, Tim here!

This is going to be a smaller post, but I’m excited to show off some of the things that I have been noodling on for the past few weeks. As mentioned in the previous dev blog, the Fire and Earth characters are getting a new coat of paint, and I personally think they are turning out really great. Some of the main things I wanted to improve were the animations, poses and making their proportions a bit more "heroic" and unique.



One of the details I’m particularly happy with is the dynamic physics for cloth and other things that move depending on what the character is doing. Check out the dice-necklace in the Earth Wizard gif for example. Small details like these really makes the characters much more believable and feel less static.

I am also continuing to improve things across the board and the fire wizard got a few improvements last week along with some upgrades to the Wizard Select screen. There is still animation timings to tighten up and adding proper graphics for spells, so it's safe to say that there are still much work to be done on the character side of things, but tasks are getting worked on at a steady pace.



With the upgrades for Fire and Earth, the Water wizard and his spells are feeling painfully out of date and not at the quality level that we want. The Water wizard design itself is still interesting, but we definitely now want to tweak and improve it even further. The next playtest/beta update won't have graphical changes for him yet, but rest assured that he will get the same treatment over the coming months. I am definitely also looking forward to updating all the water spell graphics to be at the same quality as the new fire spells!

Water Wizard concept art by our friends at Ghost Ship Games.

In other news, our current short term goal is to get the next playtest/beta build out in about a week's time, but we still have some UI improvements, balance and bug fixing to do first.

That’s it for now, we’re very excited to see what you think of the coming changes!

Tim

Greetings Spellslingers!

We are currently working on new features, but still need a few more weeks to finish things. So we wanted to let you know what is going on behind the scenes.


The main thing we are working on is a deep redesign of the Transcendence (difficulty) system. Instead of simple stages with cumulative challenges, we are introducing the “Void Map”, representing the progress of defeating the Voidwalkers. To traverse the map, you must complete increasingly harder challenges, while unlocking new loadouts/artifacts/relics/etc.

Work in progress, UI may change substantially: Select challenges from a list to match the challenge rating of the Void Map.


Tim is also working on new character art for wizards, and has made a lot of progress on new Fire and Earth wizard graphics. We’ve got some help from Ghost Ship Games with concepting parts of the new designs with an aim for a stronger ‘personality’, and we’re quite excited for also revamping the wizard animations. The Fire Wizard graphics are going to be available in the next playtest/beta update, but we also hope to have time to finish the new Earth Wizard. We will drop a few more teasers for how they are progressing on twitter and discord, so keep an eye out for those.

Work in Progress: First pass on the new fire wizard graphics.

Work in progress: The new earth wizard art direction.


Thorbjørn started working on redesigning part of the map- and encounter/reward systems, attempting to solve a few different design issues (e.g. shards being too important, too many spells in late-game, shops being too rare). However, only some of these changes will be ready for the next update. There are also a few other changes like how loadouts are going to work, but we will share details on that closer to the next update.


As a final note, we have been looking into ways to give new people access to the beta. Our plan is to start running short Steam Playtest sessions, but we will combine this with a small closed beta on our Discord. We are expecting to start this process shortly after the next update is released.
That's all for now! We will try to write more posts like this in the future, so please let us know in the comments about the subjects you would like to hear more about.

Tim and Thorbjørn

Earlier this month, the studio behind Deep Rock Galactic announced that they were branching out (or digging in) to publishing with their new initiative Ghost Ship Publishing. Today, the team held a fifth-anniversary livestream for their hit co-op shooter, and they also announced the first three games they’ll be releasing as a publisher, including a Deep Rock Galactic spin-off, a top-down shooter, and a spell-slinging roguelike - all coming from indie teams based in Denmark.

Read more

Greetings Dice Slingers!

We are extremely excited to announce that we are partnering up with Ghost Ship Publishing, the newly launched publishing branch from the developers of Deep Rock Galactic, to bring you SpellRogue. This collaboration will give us additional support to carry on with our work and free up more of our time so that we can do what we do best, making SpellRogue a great game!



The guys at Ghost Ship are game developers themselves, so they understand our values and how we develop SpellRogue together with the community (they are also big fans of SpellRogue!). Getting on board the Ghost Ship, it feels like we can now truly reach our full vision for what we want SpellRogue to become.

If you haven’t already, please wishlist and follow SpellRogue on Steam, so you can be among the first to hear all the development news. Also, keep an eye out for the Closed Beta signup which we will be accepting signups for soon!

It is really a great time to be slinging dice and casting spells!


Tim & Thorbjørn

Greetings Dice Slingers.

We have been a bit quiet lately which means a ton of work have been going into making SpellRogue the best that it can be. We still have a ways to go, but rest assured that progress is happening and the game is truly shaping up to be something special!

You may have noticed that we took down the Steam Playtest signups recently. Don't worry if you didn't get a chance to play yet though! We are planning on replacing it with a Closed Beta playtest soon, so there will be other opportunities to have an early peek and help mold SpellRogue with your feedback and thoughts.

In the meantime, we are going to start posting regular news and blog posts so you can keep tabs on the development of SpellRogue.

This past week for instance has been all about updating our Steampage with a new SpellRogue logo, cover art, screenshots and trailer. The page should better reflect the state that the game is in, so do check out the improved Steam Page to see what the game is currently looking like.

Apart from that, Tim has also been working on improving lighting in combat (see the new screenshots), improving the wizard select scene and started work on graphics for all of the Earth spells. You might even be able to spot a few in the new trailer.

Thorbjørn is currently busy making changes to Relic's role in the game and designing some cool new spells and effects as well. We are thinking of writing a blog post to dive deeper into the designs in the future, but let us know what you would like to hear more about! For now, here’s a few interesting new spells that might get you dreaming up some fun builds.



As a final note, we have a very exciting announcement coming up next week, so don't forget to wishlist and follow SpellRogue to stay tuned!

Until then, have a great weekend!


Tim & Thorbjørn