The road so far, and the road ahead
[h3]Greetings, Void Hunters![/h3][p]Our 21st major update just went out last week and with the holiday season upon us, I wanted to take a second and talk to you about the last 3 years of Soulstone Survivors and what’s yet to come, for the game and for Game Smithing as a whole.[/p][p][/p][h2]Soulstone Survivors[/h2][p]![]()
The first ever screenshot of Soulstone Survivors, thats how old Alexi is =P[/p][p][/p][p]As you may already know, Game Smithing started as just 2 people working in our spare time. The game that was released in Early Access back in November of 2022 was developed in just a few months, and we were absolutely blown away by the reception from the community. This same warm reception is what drove us to drastically expand the scope of the game, adding many more characters, features, maps, game modes than we originally intended. We just knew we had something special in our hands that we could not take that for granted. And now, 3 years later, we still feel the same way.[/p][p][/p][p]![]()
And to think that now each character has a skill tree, runes, ascensions…[/p][p][/p][p]We still love working on Soulstone Survivors and we have quite a few free updates planned just like the one last week. And not only just content for Titan Hunt but we got a few plans for content in the Void Fields, as well as some general improvements and QoL features.[/p][p][/p][p]![]()
The Void King, circa 2025[/p][p][/p][p]We are also planning a larger content update that will come in the form of a paid DLC to be announced/released early next year (hopefully). We can’t say much about it just yet, but we are excited about how much it will expand the synergies and build potential within the game, so keep an eye on this page to see updates soon![/p][p]In short, rest assured that there’s still quite a bit to come for Soulstone Survivors![/p][p][/p][h2]Rogue Soulstone[/h2][p]It may come as a surprise to some of you, but Soulstone Survivors is not the first project from Game Smithing. We were originally developing Rogue Soulstone, before we realised that it was a little too ambitious for us at the time. You can see our very old and outdated store page, with a bunch of placeholder graphics and mechanics that we produced over 3 years ago.[/p][p][/p][p]![]()
Our proof of concept prototype, still what you can see in the game page, over 3 years later![/p][p][/p][p]Our ambition for Rogue has never wavered, and in fact, now that we have the team and experience to really do something special with it, we are more excited than ever. From the beginning, one of our main inspirations for Rogue was Risk of Rain 2, we wanted to create a fast paced action RPG, with a lot of depth and freedom to build your character, explore powerful synergies and the feeling of power (which also became a core concept of Soulstone Survivors), but at the time, there was one key feature we just weren’t ready to tackle… multiplayer. But not anymore![/p][p][/p][h3]Today we are thrilled to announce that Rogue Soulstone will have online co-op multiplayer support, and is being rebuilt from the ground up to ensure a great single + co-op experience![/h3][p][/p][p]![]()
[/p][p]We have been working on the technology side of the game for a few months now, with so much new ground to explore, and we want to do it right. Today we are sharing a development plan for the game on Rogue’s Steam page, which got a bit of a face lift with updated descriptions and an amazing new art by Victor Ferraz, so if you want more details, check it out in the steam page below![/p][p][/p][p][dynamiclink][/dynamiclink][/p][h2]And… something else?[/h2][p]After 3 years working almost exclusively on Soulstone Survivors and with Rogue Soulstone likely to still take at least a couple years of development before it’s out, we had to consider what can we do to:[/p]![]()
[/p][p]It is a much smaller project by comparison, which still allows us to move quickly and with a lot of flexibility, it has already been invaluable in assisting us to develop the netcode that powers Rogue Soulstone and get everyone in the team familiar with the technology, and it quickly became our to-go to Friday Game Night game! We will share more details about it soon(tm), and we hope you will be as excited about it as we are![/p][p][/p][h2]Closing thoughts[/h2][p]As you know, we’ve developed Soulstone Survivors very close to you, our community, always striving to listen and incorporate your feedback into the game. We want to apply that same philosophy for everything we do as a company as well, sharing with you our plans and what we are working on often and transparently, so that we can walk the road together.[/p][p]We hope this post gives you some context behind what’s happening with the game and the company. We think the future is very exciting and we hope you’d be with us throughout.[/p][p]Finally, we wanted to answer a few of questions we imagine some of you will have, and of course, if you have other questions / comments, please let us know in the comments![/p][p][/p][h3]Are you developing a co-op mode for Soulstone Survivors?[/h3][p]We have seriously considered the possibility. To be honest, we still consider it. As it stands now, we just see too many challenges to deliver something with the level of quality we would expect for the game. There are several deeply challenging issues:[/p]
- [p]Increase the likelihood that we can accomplish on our ambitions for Rogue Soulstone, primarily by improving our technical expertise in multiplayer development[/p]
- [p]Give the team something fun and fresh to work on whilst we develop the core tech for Rogue Soulstone, before we all jump into another multi-year development cycle[/p]
- [p]Performance: We have done a lot of work to improve the performance of the game, but we know it isn’t perfect still. We’ve reached a point of diminishing returns on performance work. The design of the game is such that we would need to basically re-write large portions game to have it perform significantly better than it is at the moment. Now, imagine having 2 players in a match… Even people with high-end machines would likely struggle, since power scales so quickly.[/p]
- [p]Code architecture: A lot of games suffer from tremendous tech-debt. That’s fortunately not our case. The project is stable and easy to work on. However, its architecture is not conducive to multiplayer as it was never intended for that. We would need a major refactor that would likely introduce many bugs, make the game harder to work on and less stable.[/p]
- [p]Design: The game and its gameplay systems were designed for single-player. Having it multiplayer in a way that is interesting and fun would not be a simple design task. For example, would we have more enemies on the screen for 2 players? How would the camera work? Do both players level up together or individually? And many, many other questions / decisions. We would want the game to be more than just “2 players launching spells randomly together”, but rather something truly co-op… stuff like “you get this, I get that, we create a synergy that is way more powerful than what we could do alone!”, but since the game was designed for single player, the game already allows a single player to create tons of synergies without another player.[/p]