Soulstone Survivors News

Welcome to another Soulstone Survivors devlog! Today we got some interesting stuff to share. A sneak peak of a new character, a new debuff, new soundtrack and more!

[h3]As we 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]Sneak Peeks [/h2]
Colombo and Alex have been working on some new, interesting stuff. Lets just say that this one is a boney one… can you guess which character this will be? Let us know in the comments!
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
We also thought it would be really cool to share another little secret. After working on this new feature, Lucas has reported he has been having some weird dreams… finding a lot of black cats on the street… we still have no idea why…


[h2]Options Reorganized[/h2]
Over time we have added a ton of options for you to play with in the Options menu and it was getting pretty cluttered, so for the next update Juan has worked on reorganizing and fixing a few minor issues with this panel, check it out:
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[h2]New Death Soundtrack[/h2]
We are also fans of Gama’s work here at the Game Smithing office and he has been cooking up a new soundtrack for the sad moment in the game where you get unalived, and he wanted to share a small sample of what he got in the works:
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[h2]Behind The Scenes of Void Hunters Design[/h2]
Since you all seemed to enjoy our beautiful sketch of the Unholy Cathedral boss and fight, we though of sharing even more sketches! This time around, we wanted to talk about how we approach character design! At this stage in the game, when designing a new character we generally start by first looking at what skill types and fantasies are under represented in the existing characters, to help us guide the theme and what sort of mechanics will be expected.

“What if the thing went around and as you move it keeps its distance…?”

Once those are defined, we make a high level decision about the theme and name of the class this Void Hunter will represent and what weapons it will use, but still subject to change. Once we are happy, the first thing we decide is the character’s ascension, which helps us nail down exactly what the general theme of the character will be both for gameplay mechanics and visuals. For the Demon Hunter, for example, we wanted a Void Hunter that uses ranged weapons but also dips into chaotic magic, so the class felt like an obvious answer. Our theme for the Demon Hunter is a Void Hunter that through his mastery of hunting the most corrupted demons of the void, learned to harness this same power and even control said demons to do his bidding, but still resists the temptation to become corrupted himself.

“… then maybe the thing makes these cross yellow lines (that I dont want to spoil what they represent) go that direction? / ah yeah, that would be awesome!”

After that is out of the way, we start talking about the skills themselves. At this point we already know what skill types each weapon will have, and these will have a big impact not only on the visual theme of the skill but also in what the skill does, mechanically speaking.

Designing skills is actually quite challenging, since we have to be mindful of our game’s limitations, such as the top down point of view, auto casted skills, crazy scaling over a match, performance implications and how often each skill gets used, etc. At this point we try to come up with unique mechanics that feel refreshing to play with, but that also can fill gaps in our huge roster of skills, thinking not only of how the skills will work but how they compliment the existing content in the game. This is usually a very long process, and in the end we hope it turns out to be a fun new character!

This was all we had for today! Hope you enjoyed what we had to show. Keep an eye out for news, I have a feeling you won’t regret it. Let us know what you would like us to talk about next!

We hope you all have a lovely day or night,



~Soulstone Team

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