Quick Development Update | Dev Blog 3

[h2]Hi, Rogues,[/h2]
Antishyr here, the community manager of Streets of Rogue 2. It's about time we brought you some news on how the development is going. I sat down with the game's solo programmer/designer, Matt Dabrowski, to chat about what he's been up to lately, and here's the result: a miscellaneous bunch of developments that are either happening right now or have recently been completed. Expect this devblog to be slightly shorter than the two previous ones, as this one is less visually rich and is meant to give the community an idea of where SoR 2 is at currently.

Note from Matt: Please bear in mind that anything and everything you read here is subject to change. Some of the specific design elements you'll see here have been planned for a long time, but haven't gotten much (if any) implementation work until fairly recently. Good games are built on strong foundational systems, and it's taken a long time to get those foundations in place, but I think it was worth it! My intention has always been to make my game systems super flexible and easy to mess with. In fact, I'm planning to allow a large number of my "official" design decisions to be totally subverted with the mutators system. It's entirely possible that some of the design elements below just won't work out. But that's what pre-Early Access and Early Access is for!

[h3]🎮 DEMO UPDATE WHEN?[/h3]
First things first, I'm fully aware you've been expecting an update for the demo for some time now. I happen to have a quick update on this front for you: Matt's planning on delivering the next version as soon as the demo is, quoting him, "a much better representation of the core gameplay loop that I'm currently working toward for the Early Access release."

[h3]🎨 DESIGN IMPLEMENTATION & BALANCE[/h3]

❓ What is Design implementation?
Speaking of gameplay, you may've seen a section called "Design Implementation & Balance" on our Development Roadmap:



You probably understand what balance is, but might ask, "Just what the hell does 'Design Implementation' mean exactly?" In short, it's about writing code for elements of the game's design that are not yet in the game. Example: Matt has designed a whole system of Mayors controlling cities across the world, and the player must take those guys (or gals!) down to gain influence and eventually attempt to topple the President. In order for the whole process to play out, however, you need to have all the elements in place:

• The Mayor's dwelling must have several floors and function as a dungeon.
  
• Mayors will come in different varieties—e.g., a cultist mayor who has a massive following (and does podcasts every now and then) or a sewer-dwelling cannibal mayor whose primary source of protein is another NPC's body.
  
• Each of those city boss types must have their own unique dialogue, types of quests they dole out, etc.
  
• Methods of taking down the Mayor or gaining their favor (and the repercussions for these) are intended to be quite varied. SOR1 offered a glimpse at this, but SOR2 will take the system much further.
  

...and so on.

It sounds like a lot, but thankfully, the game's infrastructure was built to allow for gameplay systems like these to be implemented quickly and rapidly iterated upon.



⚰️ Death Penalty "What's the penalty for death?" has been on Matt's mind for a while as one of the most crucial design/balance dilemmas. The goal is to avoid making kicking the bucket too punishing (running halfway across the city to your corpse to retrieve lost items in a dangerous area is unlikely) while keeping the stakes high enough to maintain tension. There are always players who demand the difficulty to pack more of a punch, and those who just want to chill. Mutators that tweak the conditions will be meant to solve this.

💼 Professions
Another outstanding item on the dev agenda at the moment is profession specialization. In the first game, the Hacker, in addition to stealthily fiddling with computers, could actually put up a decent fight if the situation demanded it. With the sequel, the story will be different—picking a fight while playing as a weak character won't be as viable of an option. But, the game will offer more varied ways to improve your system breaching skills, as well as new skills you can acquire via augmentation booths. Essentially, it'll be more important to actually role-play!



[h3]🌎 WORLD TIER SYSTEM[/h3]
Another important aspect that's being fleshed out as we speak is region difficulty tiers. Think of these tiers like a typical RPG system that includes higher-level monsters, weapons and armor in higher-level regions, but applied broadly to a bunch of different types of skills and aspects of the game world that may not necessarily be combat-oriented. To give a general example, if you've picked a Hacker and your skills are currently around tier 2, cracking a tier 3 security system might be achievable but quite tough. Or, a tier 8 police station might flat-out refuse to assign missions to your tier 4 Cop character due to being underqualified.

So, how will region tiers be determined? That's still up in the air; Matt is leaning toward a ruleset similar to one Skyrim utilizes. Each region is given a range of tiers—for example, a region has a range of tiers from 5 to 10. If you enter for the first time when your character is below tier 5, the region locks its level to 5, and you'll probably have a tough time unless you improve your character first. If you enter for the first time when your character is tier 7, the region will lock itself to tier 7 or 8, giving you a tier-appropriate challenge. And if you enter when your character is above tier 10, the region would lock to tier 10, and you'd have an easy time. This is oversimplifying it a bit, and this approach to difficulty may not even pan out to Matt's liking, but we'll see how it goes!

It's worth adding that the game world is planned to be dynamic—as the player, you'll shape it by your actions. Random events occurring every now and then will impact factions and mayoral standings. All of this could potentially impact a region's difficulty regardless of its initially assigned difficulty tiers.

[h3]🖥️ OPTIMIZATION[/h3]
High RAM usage has been one of Matt's primary concerns when it comes to SoR 2's performance. The higher volume of art used in the sequel compared to the first game gradually resulted in the game using up to a crazy 11 GB of RAM (Thank you to all those who reported this issue). It needed to be addressed ASAP, and thankfully Matt has been able to reduce this to about half its previous size by improving asset handling in the Unity engine. Further improvements will likely come at a later point, but for now we think it's down to an acceptable level.

[h3]🎨 BUG FIXES[/h3]
Everpresent. Don't get us wrong here, we don't want to fix every single bug before shipping the Early Access version. But the most likely candidates for fixing will fall into two categories: It breaks the game in a not-fun way, or it's super noticeable and ridiculous. NPCs getting out of bed and immediately getting stuck between the bed and their wall would fall into this category. If that's ever happened to you in your personal life, you're probably aware that it's a terrible way to start your day. In addition to that, Matt's addressed a pesky problem where the game wouldn't start properly sometimes, but instead would load up one of your save files with dozens of MB of garbage data. Not a good call, video game.

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As always, we appreciate your support! Share your thoughts on the devblog below and wishlist/follow Streets of Rogue 2 to stay up to date with the news:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2165810/Streets_of_Rogue_2/
Read previous dev blogs: Devblog I: Vehicles Devblog II: Chunks

Watch video devlogs: Devlog 1: How I Approach World-Building? 🌎 Devlog 2: Creating an Open World Solo 🗺️ Devlog 3: Games That Inspired SoR 2 💡 Devlog 4: New Release ETA, Roadmap 🗺️
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