Soulstone Survivors News

We are happy to announce that together with our friends at Bolt Blaster Games we are making a Soulstone Survivors x The Spell Brigade bundle on Steam! We hope you will have a lot of fun playing both of the games!

[h3]Here is a link where you can find the Soulstone Brigade bundle and learn more about the games![/h3]

https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/46037/Soulstone_Brigade/

As always, thank you very much for your support!

Have a great day!



~Soulstone Survivors Team

Welcome to another Soulstone Survivors devlog! Today we got some cool stuff to share with you about performance but also about how we work together as a team, so if you are curious about game development this might be a cool one for you!

[h3]As we get progress further into development, we also invite you to sign up to our new mailing list and be among the first to find out when its released![/h3]

[h2]Reducing quantity of particle systems[/h2]

Almost every special effect you see in the game, such as explosions, trails, slashes… are made out of multiple particle systems. We can create really cool visual effects with them, however they can really become a hit to performance.

Fellipe, one of our programmers has come up with a cool solution: normally if you want to play the same effect in two different positions, you will have two separate particle effects, one in each position, doing their own thing. However, there is a way that we can essentially “play” just one effect, in two (or many) different positions at the same time.

When you are talking about 1 or 2 particle effects this wont make much of a difference, but when you are talking about thousands of arrows hitting enemies such as in Storm of Arrows… we can convert literally dozens of thousands of particle systems into a single one that is played thousands of times, allowing Unity to perform additional internal optimizations to their rendering and processing. Check out the difference it makes with the two videos below:

Before
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
After
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
With the new changes, we have one single Particle System, and every time we need to play said effect, we can do so a lot more efficiently without changing anything in the visuals of said effects.

[h2]New Projectile Type[/h2]
Juan and Lucas have been working on a new projectile type, which we are internally calling “swarming projectiles”. Check out this video of the new projectile type in action! The skill in the video uses placeholder visuals but you can expect it to make an appearance very soon!
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[h2]Build Tools[/h2]
If you are a game developer or just interested in how the sausage gets made, this section will certainly be interesting to you.

As you may know, we currently support 3 versions of the game: Full, Prologue and the Demo. For each of these versions, we currently support 3 platforms: Windows, Mac and Linux. This means that we often have to make 9 builds of our project to test everything before submitting it to Steam. Each of these builds have a different set of configuration parameters. Needless to say, making a batch of builds is not only time-consuming but also error-prone.

To solve this issue, we’ve recently developed an internal build tool to help us manage and automate this process:

With this tool we are now able to configure and build many builds — all 9 configurations in fact — at once, with just one click. The tool takes care of the game configuration for the given flavor, distribution channel and flags. If you are interested in more behind-the-scenes stuff, do let us know, we’d love to share more of this stuff with you!
[h2]Behind the scenes of Mh’thaeus Design[/h2]
We thought it would be really cool to show the really simple sketch we made in our initial design discussion of how the Unholy Cathedral boss and fight would work. We gather the team together and we start throwing ideas out, thinking of how the arena must be shaped, how skills interact with each other, how the boss skills will interact with the different void hunters (such as the Death Knight that doesnt have dodge)… and then we start pulling back and filtering into mechanics that seem like will work well together! Check out the beautiful art below by Allan, our not artist! (please don’t bully us for our amazing drawing skills =P and don't mind the Portuguese!)

This was all we had for today folks! Hope you enjoyed what we had to show. Keep an eye out for news, it might be worth your while... Let us know what you would like us to talk about next!

We hope you all have a lovely day or night,



~Soulstone Team

Welcome to another Soulstone Survivors devlog! Last week we released our latest update, Embrace of Chaos so right now you can see in-game some of the work we have been working on for a while, but there is still a lot of work in progress going on for the next few updates!

[h3]As a reminder we also wanted to invite you to sign up to our new mailing list, we haven't even used it yet haha but if you are interested in our games, thats the place to be![/h3]

While we continue to focus heavily on more performance changes, we are still not ready to show some of the cooler things we are doing, however there is more to the game than performance! Check these out!

[h2]New Character Sneak Peek[/h2]
We have been hard at work developing our next, upcoming character! We already have a lot of its functionality ready, still developing new code for some skills, new runes... and we think a lot of you will be excited for this one! We still want to make it a surprise though, so... can you guess what the next character is judging only from these props here?? Let us know your guess in the comments!
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[h2]Demon Hunter Behind the Scenes [/h2]
In the process of making the little videoclip intro for the demon hunter, Colombo, our 3D artists, faced some… unique scaling issues to make everything work properly, check out this behind the scenes of the process of making the intro for the demon hunter:
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
We also thought it would be cool to show some amazing concept art of the Demon Hunter, done by Alex, our 2D artist, check it out!

And that's all we can show for this one! We have been putting a lot of work into the new content that will be coming to the game not only in this next update but a couple of future ones, so we don't want to reveal too much too soon!

We are working on a new State of the Game video to be published next week where we will discuss everything that is going on in more detail so if you are interested keep an eye out here and on our YouTube channel!

We hope you all have a lovely day or night,



~Soulstone Team

[h3]Feel the Embrace of Chaos as our 13th major update lands with a new character! Not only that but it also comes with new Artifact Powers and huge performance improvements![/h3]



[h3]New Character - The Demon Hunter[/h3]

• The Demon Hunter has arrived, a master of ranged combat and chaos itself. Armed with dual crossbows, they bring a new level of lethality to the Void Hunters. Their swift, critical strikes are as unpredictable as they are devastating, making them the ultimate predator of the void.
  
  You can now craft his new weapons and use the new unique skills, runes and of course try his powerful new Ascension!
  

[h3]New Artifact Powers[/h3]

• You can now unlock the Artifact Powers for the Demon Hunter, Hound Master and Spellblade by upgrading their weapons to the Artifact rarity!
  

[h3]Major Performance reworks[/h3]
While last update saw a few localized performance improvements, this time around we have a few major system refactors that were in the works for a long time making their way into the game. These should considerably improve the FPS of the game in most scenarios, especially very late game such as high Endless and Overlord. Here’s a quick summary of those changes:

• Negative effects almost entirely refactored to use every last bit of performance possible. Should make a big difference for builds that rely heavily on them;
  
• New collision detection system for almost every skill in the game. Should provide major improvements in very hectic scenarios. Will have close to no affect for projectile heavy skills, like Storm of Arrows, but all others should be considerably faster;
  
• Considerably reduced the disc size of the game for faster download;
  
• Considerably reduced amount of memory used by the game, which not only should make it overall faster but more stable especially in late game scenarios;
  

[h3]General changes and fixes:[/h3]

• Changed how Brittle is calculated under the hood. It no longer benefits from your stats and skill modifiers twice, being now more in line with all other damage increasing negative effects in the game;
  
• New intro animation for the existing hidden bosses;
  
• Fixed an issue that caused the negative effect Wound to not work (currently applied only by one of the Hound Master’s dogs);
  
• Fixed Spinning Staff tooltip which was scaling incorrectly;
  
• Player target areas (blue circles) no longer show in Endless and Overlord cycles, to reduce the visual clutter;
  
• Added a counter of the number of summoned units to the Artifact Power interface;
  
• Fixed an issue where in a very specific scenario the Endless/Overlord completion percentage would not be saved properly in your player profile;
  
• Fixed a pathfinding issue for enemies in the Dungeon of Despair;
  
• Fixed an issue where Lord of the Void statues could be “lying down”;
  
• Fixed an issue where if your health went negative in the Unholy Cathedral with unique power ups, the display could bug and end up showing a very high number instead;
  
• Fixed an issue where the Assassin mission text was not being localized;
  
• Fixed an issue in the Unholy Cathedral where buffs from the previous cycle would not be reset when starting a new cycle;
  
• Fixed an issue where Chaos Golems would not be able to move in the second stage of the Unholy Cathedral;
  
• Fixed an issue where skills that had “sub projectiles” like Surprise Gift or Noxious Shot would count as more than 1 source of their respective negative effects;
  
• Fixed an issue were in very specific scenarios skills like Icy Veins would not work at all, leading to strange errors;
  
• Multiple small fixes and improvements in the UI;
  

We hope you will enjoy this update as we are already working hard on new content for the next one! Performance has been a big focus for us but there is still a bunch of stuff coming! We will update our roadmap shortly after this update, where we will discuss in more detail what is coming, what plans changed and the path forward, so if you would like to check it out keep an eye out for our announcements here!

[h3]Community Event: Big Damage[/h3]

To celebrate the new update we will also be running an old favourite in our Discord community, the Big Damage event! Come up with the build that deals the most damage possible in 10 minutes, send your results and win gift cards and game keys! If you want to learn more head over to our Discord!

Finally, if you would like to receive updates like this one via email, we would also like to invite you to our new mailing list! We are still to send our first email, but that will be a great way to get news about the game and overall studio if you are interested in what we might have store in the future!

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

Have a great day!



~Soulstone Team

Welcome to the sixth Soulstone Survivors devlog!! You are about to witness some work in progress of a new skill, performance improvements and some changes to how the crafting UI looks.

[h3]Next major update is already getting closer and closer, so we also invite you to sign up to our new mailing list and be among the first to find out when its released![/h3]

[h2]Performance Improvements - XP Crystals[/h2]
Before we get to the good stuff, lets get the usual performance update out of the way. This time around we are going to be looking at changes made to the XP crystals. During a match, players can sometimes accumulate many hundreds or even thousands of XP crystals laying around on the map and this can lead to significant performance degradation.

Luckily, the XP crystals have a very well defined behavior which is very suitable for some pretty neat optimizations. Check out the results we got from said optimizations:

[h3]Before[/h3]
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[h3]After[/h3]
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
In these videos you can see me spawning 100k XP crystals on a 50 meter radius around the player. Before the changes, my machine could barely handle it, running the game at single-digit FPS whereas after the changes it has no problem at all, reaching over 100 FPS.

Now for the nerds in all of us, a big, but not the only reason why these crystals are so much lighter now is the rendering. Before we were using vanilla Unity rendering techniques (i.e.: mesh renderers). But now, put it a different way, we tell the GPU: “here, render 100k copies of this object”, as opposed to “render some here, some other here, another there…”.

Now, we manually render all of the crystals using GPU instancing, which allows us to render every crystal at once, reducing the overhead. Check out these visual examples below:

[h3]Unity Vanilla Rendering[/h3]

[h3]The New Approach [/h3]

The top version is Unity’s vanilla rendering: it takes 3 draw-calls to render the crystals; where the bottom gif with the new approach only takes 1 draw-call to render all of them.

[h2]New Upcoming Skill[/h2]
We have also been working on some new skills recently and our artists have been doing an awesome job on those and we often need new 3D models for them. Check out this 3D model for an upcoming new skill:
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[h2]Visual Changes in the Blacksmith UI[/h2]
Lucas, one of our programmers has been working on how the crafting tab currently looks, to improve its readability. Check out the screenshot below to see how that is going:

And this was all we had to show for this Devlog! We have been hard at work to improve performance, UI visibility and new skills. But keep an eye out for news because we have some really cool stuff coming... Let us know what you would like us to talk about next!

We hope you all have a lovely day or night,



~Soulstone Team