Soulstone Survivors News

[h3]Greetings, Void Hunters! ːsssthumbː[/h3]

While we continue working hard towards our next major update, we just made a major performance breakthrough, along with some critical fixes that we thought were worth an update of their own!

[h3]Major performance improvements:[/h3]

• All skills that in any way relate to projectiles should be CONSIDERABLY faster. Most skills should be unchanged in regards to functionality, however a few skills have had the number of projectiles they use reduced, and the damage increased to compensate for the change;
• If you choose to set your special effects visibility to 0, now there will be an additional performance boost especially with projectile-heavy builds, however it should not be necessary;
  

If you are curious about how we achieved these performance gains, check out our latest devlog!
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2066020/view/595135124815740979

[h3]General Changes:[/h3]

• Fixed a critical issue where in rare situations the game could start and freeze on a black screen;
  
• Fixed an issue where multiple “Area” skills (such as Void, Bloody Saw, etc) would not properly apply “on hit/on crit” and other types of passive effects you might have. This fix should make those skills considerably stronger;
  
• Fixed bug where when you unlock any skin, you also get the animation for unlocking the Engineer;
  
• Fixed an issue where the power ups that cause Burn, Doom, Poison and Bleed to cause instant damage were getting benefits from Disarray twice, and not tracking their damage properly;
  
• Fixed an issue where the Myrmidon might stop being able to gain and use Buff Status, which was related to how she gets buffed from her passive minions;
  
• Fixed issue where mouse cursor would be present in all gameplay menus on Linux (Steam Deck), such as Skill Selection screen and so on;
  
• The game now hides the gameplay UI and stops you from pausing the game while loading the content for the next map (for example, when you enter the Overlord Portal and the game is loading the next level);
  
• Fixed issue where Smoke Bomb would not log any hits even though it would apply negative effects;
  
• Fixed issue where Frost Totem and Mana Beam could not damage pillars;
  
• Fixed collider sizes of all enemies, many a which were considerably smaller than their visuals, sometimes leading to strange issues;
  
• Fixed issue where the player Profile Overview might show the fastest Unholy Cathedral match in the "Fastest Match" category, which should be reserved for Void Fields matches only;
  
• Fixed bug where the Pirate's ascension tooltip would conflict with the "replace options with passives" button;
  
• Fixed an issue where your currencies (such as Minor Soulstones) could be shown rounded up, causing issues such as when you have 5990 Minor Soulstones, showing as 6k;
  
• Fixed minor issue where Bloody Saw and Beacon of Light tooltips would show the incorrect damage interval.
  

We hope that this small update will make your experience smoother for the time being, but there is still A LOT coming to the game in the coming months! We got a new Content Sneak Peek coming this Friday (Dec 20th) so if you are interested make sure to keep an eye out!

As always we wanted to thank you all very much for your support!

Have a great day!



~Soulstone Team

[h3]Greetings, Void Hunters! ːsssthumbː[/h3]

We bid you welcome to yet another Soulstone Survivors Devlog! In this one we are going to dig a bit deeper into our first Content Sneak Peek (if you missed it check out the post below), talk a lilttle about the new game mode and share some massive performance gains coming soon! This is a good one, so grab your tea or coffee, get comfy and come with me!

https://steamcommunity.com/games/2066020/announcements/detail/4441207839043617810

[h2]Special Edition Dev Talk[/h2]
First, we wanted to announce that we are working on a special edition Dev Talk! We will share what we have learned so far from developing Soulstone Survivors, and more importantly, how we are using these lessons in the creation of the new future content!

In this edition we will also share further details about what you can expect from our next game mode, which is going to be, by very far, the BIGGEST content update to the game ever!

[h3]It’s coming out on our YouTube channel on December 21st, so keep an eye out![/h3]

[h2]Content Sneak Peek - Mhyzahet, Terror of the Sands[/h2]
A couple of weeks ago we updated our public roadmap, and together with it our first sneak peek into a HUGE content update that is coming! There is A LOT more where that came from and we will reveal the next sneak peek next Friday, but today we wanted to look at bit closer at Mhyzahet, one of the new bosses coming to the game!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Some of you noticed that this boss might not work exactly like the others do… so I thought it would be fun to share a little bit more!

First a little trivia: Did you know that all bosses in the game are named after the developers and people important to us? This time around is no different, for this one we decided to pay homage to Mhysa, an incredibly kind and awesome member of our Discord community, the author of the incredible “Mhysa’s Guide to a Successful Survivor”! The game wouldn’t be the same without you Mhysa!

Now, what can you expect from this encounter? Some of you noticed that this boss has a very specific place in the map… a proper boss room! This is coming as a part of our new game mode, where after you complete… well, lets say “something” for now =P, you gain access to the boss of the map, in this case, the Lair of Mhyzahet.


This new boss is special in more than one way. We want it to be a meaningful encounter, and with a set layout for the boss room, we can leverage the layout of the room to create more interesting skills. But not only you can expect a greater challenge, defeating this titanic creature will also grant you a new type of unique power up, from a pool of power ups that can only be found from this specific boss!

There is a lot more to talk about, but if you want to learn more details about how this new game mode will work, make sure to check out our special edition Dev Talk mentioned above!

[h2]Projectile Performance[/h2]
As you probably know by now, performance has been a big priority for us. We have made huge strides in multiple areas, but there is one that is currently the worst FPS killer… the dreaded… projectiles ːssssadː!

Skills like Fan of Bombs currently can cause massive FPS drops if you abuse it with a lot of skill chains, multicast and cast frequency. For a long time we have been investigating what we could do to improve the situation… and well, I’ll let the video below speak for itself:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
In the video we are showcasing Spreadshot with 10k Extra Cast chance and 10k Cast Frequency, also known as “crazy numbers”. First, we use the standard Spreadshot, which runs at an average of 13.8 FPS, or, in another words, using 72ms per frame (definitely not the slowest skill out there!). Then, we switch to the new and optimized Spreadshot in the exact same scenario, and it runs at an average of 47.8 FPS, or in another words, using 20.9ms per frame. The graph below illustrates these numbers with more precision:


Now let me give you a TL;DR: with the latest optimizations, we managed to make projectiles 70% faster to run than before. Not all projectiles will get the full treatment because it is an arduous process, but ALL projectiles will be a lot faster! This end result is a combination of 3 techniques:

1. Remade physics logic: we now use a different, multithreaded logic to simulate the physics for projectiles, which is much, much faster than before. It does come at a small loss of precision, but the gains are massive and worth it in a game like ours;
   
   
2. Remade visual effects: it might be hard to tell from the video because they look so similar, but a big part of the performance gain came from switching from the old Unity Particle System, to the new one. The new one is made to run in the GPU, so it has a smaller overhead in the CPU, which is most of the time the bottleneck. This is actually an arduous process because these systems are very different and we need to remake each projectile by hand, so we will probably implement this improvement slowly, only on the most dire projectiles;
   
   
3. Repositioning projectiles instead of disabling them: I don’t want to get into too much detail here, but normally, when you are done with an object in a game, like an Enemy or a Projectile in this case, you “turn it off”, so that the Engine knows it doesnt need to care about it, but keeps the object in memory. Then, when you need a new Enemy or Projectile, you get this object again and place it in the position you want it, you turn it on again, telling the engine “hey, remember that projectile? we want to use it again”. This is known as “object pooling” and is pretty standard since it is a lot faster to reuse something than create something new. Now… we noticed that just the act of “enabling” the projectile was causing a crazy high overhead, because the engine needs to “re-register” the projectile internally and do all sorts of stuff, and in this very specific case of projectiles, just moving them away into outter space, and then moving them back, WITHOUT disabling them… made another huge performance difference. (PS: Dont do this at home kids, our architecture supports this well, but its not applicable for every game and architecture)
   

[h2]Closing Thoughts[/h2]
We are extremely excited about the future of Soulstone Survivors, we have been working for months in the background on a couple of massive features and it feels awesome to finally start to share more with you! Please do let us know your thoughts about what you see in the comments below, and I hope to see you in the next one!

We hope you have a lovely day or night,



~ The Soulstone Team

Greetings, Void Hunters! ːsssthumbː

My name is Allan, I'm the lead developer of Soulstone Survivors and today I wanted to have a chat with you. This November marks a very special time for us here at Game Smithing, as Soulstone Survivors celebrates 2 years of Early Access ːsssloveː, and on top of that, our recent reviews just hit the amazing mark of 95% positive on Steam which is the best gift we could ask for! So to start, I wanted to personally thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for all the support you have given us so far!

As a little thank you, we have prepared a couple things to share with you today that we hope you will enjoy!

[h3]First, it's a long time coming but today we are finally sharing our new Content Roadmap![/h3]
PS: You can also find the localized version of the roadmap in our game page, in all the languages we support.

Now, while its certainly great to have a public roadmap to give you all a better sense of what to expect from the game moving forward... there is only so much we can show in the roadmap itself. We got a ton of stuff in the works, some of which we have been working on for quite a long time in the background and while we ourselves are super excited about it... we want to get you excited about it as well! With that in mind, starting here and now, we present to you our first...

[h2]Content Sneak Peek #1[/h2]
Over the coming weeks and months we will be sharing small videos to showcase all the new stuff we are working on in secret for a while... I know some of you might feel like all we do these days is work in new characters and you want to see something different... so to begin with we prepared a little something for you:
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
You might be wondering... is this another regular map? Is this a regular boss?? What else is coming??? When will this be released???? To find the answer to all of these questions... keep an eye out for out next Content Sneak Peek video! We plan to release those regularly moving forward as we prepare for what will be, BY VERY FAR, the biggest update the game has ever seen!

[h2]The journey so far[/h2]
I also felt like this was a great time to reflect on the journey so far. When Soulstone Survivors came into Early Access on 7th November of 2022, our team was mainly composed of 3 people, Alex, Gama and me. For most of the time we still had our old jobs and we were working basically all night to get a cool game done. At that time we were also VERY lucky to have the amazing help of our friends Fernando, Tiago and Aruan, which were instrumental to get us to the finish line when we did. At that time we were still unsure of how the game would be received, what people would like, would NOT like... but we had built in our heads a plan for what the "full release" of the game would be, which then became our first public Roadmap (added as a thumbnail below, because its huge haha you can click on it to view its details):



As you can see, our vision for Soulstone Survivors was always for it to be a deep game, with tons of skills and ways to build your character, this was the pillar we were building the game upon. We wanted to add a lot of skills, characters, weapons, we knew we wanted to try playing with new game modes... but, we didnt want to promise anything we would not be able to make with our tiny team. So while it was already a lot of content to develop, we kept it simple, comfortable, something we thought "yeah we can do this over the next year if we really put our all into it, hopefully with the game release we will be able to support ourselves and get there".

Then we released into Early Access, and we couldn't believe the reception the game had right from the start. There were literally thousands of players playing the game simultaneously, tons of people joining our Discord, participating in the Steam forums, interested in the game and sharing their experiences... and we just couldn't believe our eyes. We felt honored, humbled, overjoyed... and a minute later despair haha there were so many things to fix, to improve, to add... and while it was a TON of work, literally sleeping once every 3 days for a few weeks... we were just super excited to do it. Once the fires settled a little bit, we released a lot of hotfix updates and even some new content, we took a step back, a deep breath, and thought "what comes next?"

We had our plans of what the game could be, of what we could build with our little team... but we also had all of these other cool ideas we dreamed of implementing, and you guy also had so many great ideas we knew would make a huge difference for the game, so we had to make a choice. Either we stick to the plan to hit full release around a year after the start of Early Access and deliver a pretty cool game, or, we could listen to you, to the community, and to our own hearts and aim to make Soulstone Survivors the best game it can be. I can safely say this was a pretty obvious choice for all of us.

We immediatelly started hiring new developers to give us more hands as we had a lot of ambitious features and goals to tackle, and thats when we really started working on a lot of the features that you find in the game today, such as Character Ascensions, Character Skill Trees, major reworks on skill types... ah, way too many to mention!! Sometimes I think of what might have been... if we had stuck to the plan maybe today we would have the game fully released, we might even have a whole new game pretty much done (I'm looking at you Rogue Soulstone), but then I remember everything we added to the game that wouldnt be there... remember all the messages of support, of players thanking us for adding this or that... I look at the game we have today... and I know that we have made the right choice.

There is still a lot of hard work ahead of us till get the to the full release and more work after that as well, and every day I feel lucky for this opportunity to work on a game I love, with an amazing team, the best community, and all the amazing people we met along the way. Here's to you, to Soulstone Survivors, and for all that's still coming!

I hope you have a great day, and I'll see you all in the next one!



~ Allan and the Soulstone Team

Greetings, Void Hunters!

Welcome to another Soulstone Survivors Devlog! This one is a week late as we have been hard at work on the new [REDACTED], but today we wanted to bring more details to you about a few cool changes we are working on!

[h2]Ascensions Rework[/h2]
When we first introduced the Ascensions system, we wanted those to feel like impactful gameplay mechanics unique to each character, to further distinguish their playstyles. They intentionally have varying levels of reward and demand, some might basically happen automatically while others might be more involved, and we like that they feel different. However, with your feedback and our own testing we know that some ascensions felt just underwhelming or cumbersome to interact with. We have already improved in many ways quite a few of those powers, but there are two that are getting major overhaul to how they work in the next update.

[h2]Hound Master’s Ascension[/h2]
While we definitely want to make his dogs a main part of his ascension power, right now it is probably the least interesting ascension in how it works. You basically feed your dogs and they get stronger, which conceptually is fine, but in practice what happens is you feed them so much that it is never a decision, it is just about “get a few beefs now and then and they will be fine”. We wanted to keep the general concept, but make it more visually interesting and exciting to play with.

[h3]New Mechanics and Visuals[/h3]
To begin with, we completely remade his Ascension bar, which now looks like this:


The overall concept is still very similar: your goal is to make sure your doggies are well fed, but here’s how it works in the new system:

You might have noticed that the doggie is on a sort of track. The doggies will always be walking towards the blue bowl, and your objective is to fill it with food (that still drops from the monsters) before the doggie gets to it! Whenever you pick up a piece of meat, it will show up on the blue bowl at the end of the track, and once its done, the doggie will rush to eat and will be very pleased to enjoy a nice meal, gaining a major buff and increasing in size:


He will then go back to his little house, but now that they are bigger they will get hungry faster… so you have less time to fill the bowl again. If you do it, they will keep getting more and more buffs and growing bigger and bigger and becoming real killing machines… however, should you fail to feed them in time before they are hungry, the doggie will be very sad indeed, and lose all its buffs and go back to his original size:


The ascension still has different power levels to it, which can go on forever. The higher the level, represented by the number above the doggie in the images, the bigger the buff the dogs receive to their stats and the larger and hungrier they will grow, which means they need to eat more frequently and eventually will go back to their original form.

We believe that this new functionality will bring those surges in power you expect to see from an ascension, where at times they will be absolutely destroying everything, and then you get a lull period where you start to build up this momentum again. This also makes it so beefs are relevant for the whole match, and you might want to time them so you give your dogs a mega boost very quickly to deal with Lords of the Void, or just get them stronger more often and for longer with more balanced feeding.

Allan also wanted to share a few words about this new mechanic:
“The Hound Master has always been one of my favourite characters and I’m glad we are giving him and these little doggies they love they deserve. This rework is especially dear to me, as I’ve recently lost my great friend Zippie, our little family doggo, the greatest little Westie we could have, that Alex referenced in the new UI… so now every time I play, Ill remember my little buddy.”

[h2]Legionnaire’s Ascension[/h2]
When we first came up with the original Legionnaire’s ascension, we always knew it was a bit of a risk. We knew it would feel different from the others due to its ramp up which then becomes entirely passive, and while conceptually the idea sounded cool, building catapults that crush your enemies, in practice the ramp up is so gradual that once again, you never have that “power surge” we wanted to create with ascensions, so it was time for a major rework.

[h3]New mechanics and Visuals[/h3]
Again, lets begin by checking out his new Ascension bar, that now looks like this:


Now, while you fight against the creatures of the void, you are going to come across wounded legionnaires. Your objective is to help them get back into shape to fight by your side. Once you have enough soldiers fighting at your side, you are able to call the full support of your army by carrying your war banner to battle!

But that is not all, of course. As the worth leader of a strong legion, enraged and encouraged, your lust for carnage will change even the scenery around you, transforming it into a deep red, where you will hear the sounds of the rough battles ahead, befitting of a legion commander. You will be given extra legionnaires to fight for you along with powerful buffs, while your army fires catapult boulders and bursts of arrows over the battlefield with a very high frequency, making it rain on your enemies. The ascension will have a set, fixed duration and will grant you a huge, and temporary, boost in power.

Once it ends, the war banner disappears and all extra legionnaires along with it, and you can start forming a new legion once again. With these changes, we are not only bring the major swing in power you get from other ascensions, but also the epic feeling of being a legion commander and being in the middle of an all out war, making it as exciting as it should be!

[h2]Closing Thoughts[/h2]
While we are excited about these changes to these two ascensions, we still have a lot of new stuff to share with you! You can check our post earlier today for a liiiittle sneak peek of what is coming up soon...
https://steamcommunity.com/games/2066020/announcements/detail/4441207839043617780

We will also FINALLY publish our revised roadmap tomorrow alongside a proper content sneak peek of something… a bit different… so if you are interested in learning more about what is coming make sure to check it out!

We hope you have a lovely day or night,



~ The Soulstone Team

Greetings, Void Hunters!

[h3]Our recent reviews just reached the unbelievable mark of 95% positive reviews :ssslove:![/h3]

We know that this came to be thanks to the Steam Awards and the Labour of Love category, which makes us even more honored to think that with so many amazing games and teams out there, some of you chose to cast your vote on our game! We really wanted to thank you from the bottom of your hearts for your support and your kind words all around!

It has been an immense pleasure to work on this game for the past two years of Early Access for all of us and this is truly only the beginning of this journey! We still have so much to build and show you, and we are extremely excited for the future of Soulstone Survivors!

[h3]If you enjoy Soulstone Survivors and like the work we have done so far please consider voting for it on the Labour of Love category for the Steam Awards 2024![/h3]



Speaking of Labour of Love and... future content... I guess the least I can do as a little thank you is share a very vague screenshot of a really cool new [REDACTED] coming to the game... can you guess what this one might be?? :ssshot:



We got a new Devlog coming later today sharing details about a couple of cool new features, and this weekend we plan to FINALLY post our updated Roadmap here on Steam as well with more details about what the above might be... so if you are interested keep your eye out!

We hope you are having a lovely day or night,



~Soulstone Team