Risk of Rain 2 News

Hey!

Believe it or not - we’re still here, and we haven’t fled the country with all our earnings. At least, not yet.

All of us at Hopoo Games have been keeping ourselves very busy these past few months - and we’re excited to catch everyone up on what we’ve been doing.



After the success of RoR2, we knew that we’d eventually expand Hopoo Games to better support RoR2 long term. During Early Access, we simply didn’t have the time or resources to find, hire, and onboard new members to our team.

Now that we hit 1.0 - and got a bit of a breather - we’re happy to announce that we have expanded the core Hopoo Games Team from 3 to 6.

[h2]Ben Schofield[/h2]

My name is Ben, and I’m here to say
I’m the newest programmer at Hopoo Ga... (mes)

In my eight years in the game industry, I've worked on pretty much everything, from UI to servers to tools, but my player-first mentality has kept my focus on gameplay. I love gameplay programming so much that I spin up side projects in my spare time just to get more of it, so I'm thrilled to dedicate my time to gameplay for Risk of Rain 2. Beyond that, I'm super excited to support this community. There's nothing better than building a game for an enthusiastic audience, so I look forward to seeing your reactions to the stuff we're cooking up!

[h2]Nick Bizzozero[/h2]

Hiya, I’m super excited to join the team - I am a huge fan of Risk of Rain 2 myself. A little about me: I started my 3d career doing mods of Project M, and I also made Strafe! Some of my favorite games include Quake, Team Fortress, Super Mario 64, and Super Smash Bros Melee. My favorite things in games are slipping and sliding around and rocket jumping : ) I will be doing my best to keep Risk of Rain 2 an engaging and visually slick experience! (╯ ͡❛ ⏥ ͡❛)╯┻━┻ 💪( ͡❛ ⏥͡❛ ҂)
[h2]Javid “Snonepe”[/h2]

Greetings! I'm Javid (Jah-vid, if you were curious). Both Risk of Rain 1 and 2 are games I've highly enjoyed and I'm absolutely ecstatic at this opportunity to contribute to the future of Risk of Rain 2!

Previously, I worked at Airship Syndicate for a few years where I handled a wide variety of animations for Battle Chasers: Nightwar and some additional work on Darksiders: Genesis. Additionally, I've worked on a couple of Source Engine based projects such as the Civil Protection Machinima, the No More Room in Hell mod and workshop items for Team Fortress 2 such as the Box Trot taunt.

I grew up playing a lot of JRPGs, some of my favorites being Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy 9 and the early Paper Mario games. When I'm not playing Risk of Rain 2, I can be found playing Final Fantasy 14, Slay the Spire or Team Fortress 2.

--

We’re excited to work with our newest members, and we hope that you’ll treat them as kindly as you have me, Paul, and Ghor :^)



As we leave 2020 (god finally) and enter into 2021, we wanted a way for fans to know how RoR2 was going to be supported going forward.

So, more roadmaps.



This roadmap is intentionally different from our Early Access Roadmap in both cadence and detail. As we explained in our last Dev Thoughts, we want players to know the game is still being supported, but we also don’t want to sacrifice our internal goals to hit the deadlines on a public roadmap. We’re keeping things flexible - so please note that the details may change over time.



March 2021 marks the 2nd year anniversary since the release of Risk of Rain 2 in Early Access. To celebrate this milestone, we’re doing a free content update!

This update is aimed towards upgrading and rounding out the game as a whole. This means that the Anniversary Update will be smaller in content compared to other CUs. Internally, we’ve already made great progress towards lore entries, quality-of-life improvements, and other meaningful changes to existing RoR2 content. We’re also revisiting some assets - like the Grandparent boss, for example - that were cut during development.

We’re also keeping an eye on our ever growing modding community, and are making some internal changes (like moving away from fixed enum indices for content and more towards scriptable objects, investigating an engine upgrade) to work toward an easier and more sustainable modding environment for RoR2.



Near the end of 2021, we will also be releasing our first ever paid expansion. The hope for this expansion is that it’s big - we’re aiming at around 2-3 content updates in size, and it will easily be the biggest infusion of new content that RoR2 has received. We believe that we need a truly meaningful update to give RoR2 fans a reason to come back and support the game - and we’re sure that this expansion will hit that mark.

Doing an expansion of this size is new territory for us - and we’ll be keeping very busy - but we will still update players on our progress as we work on the expansion. While we still plan to ship the Anniversary Update on consoles at the same cadence as previous updates, we also have an internal goal of shipping Expansion #1 on all platforms at the same time - we’ll keep you up to date on that as well.



The continued enthusiasm and support from the community makes hiring an easy choice - and we are excited that we can match our growing community with a growing team. As always - thank you for making working on RoR2 fun.

Catch you next year!
-Hopoo Games

The goal of this minor patch is to fix bugs.



• Fixed Sundered Grove’s outer bounds being inconsistent and super far
• Fixed Sundered Grove's geometry having a hole
• Fixed Sundered Grove’s floating pink mushrooms
• Fixed Sundered Grove boss spawns being extra far for Titans and Vagrants
• Fixed Sundered Grove having locations where the map disappears if you move the camera into nooks and crannies
• Fixed the Environmental Log of Sundered Grove not spawning if you had Abyssal Depths' Environmental Log unlocked
• Mitigated additional causes of Brass Contraption corpses still causing endless hitstop on melee attacks
• Properly synchronize open-and-closed doors and other permutations on Abyssal Depths, Distant Roost, and Rallypoint Delta

Hey everyone, 2020's been a tough year for many of us as we all navigated the global pandemic, but also an amazing year for games and we are proud that Risk of Rain 2 continued on its journey of delivering robust content to players with our official launch of 1.0! If Risk of Rain 2 has been a source of fun, challenge, and joy for you and your friends, please consider nominating us for a Steam Award. We'd be truly grateful.

It's been an incredible year for the game and we're genuinely thankful for your support, feedback, ideas, and precious game time. We look forward to sharing more with you in the future!

-Hopoo Games

The goal of this minor patch is to add Sundered Grove into the game, and fix a few bugs.



• New Stage: Sundered Grove



• Fixed Eclipse 3 modifiers applying to enemies
• Fixed the final boss’ shockwaves being fired an extra time for each remote client in the game
• Fixed some floating nodes in Sundered Grove
• Restored the cursor for gamepad users while in the info/scoreboard menu
• Updated all music tracks to be more similar to the OST version
• Updated a lot of localization strings
• Fixed throwing Forgive Me Please off a cliff causing it to not release its deployable slot until the next stage
• Fixed monsters revived via Dio’s Best Friend potentially respawning into out-of-bounds kill zones that make them miss the trigger, never die again, and potentially cause a softlock in this way if they are a boss
• Added temporary safety mechanism that forces client bodies to reinitialize into valid states if they are still in an invalid state one second after spawning
• Fixed ragdolling causing the hurtboxes of dead characters to become re-enabled (yes, the brass contraption ragdoll + melee bug is finally dead!)

Hey! Since we released 1.0 on PC (and continue on-going efforts to get 1.0 on consoles), our team at Hopoo Games has finally had time to evaluate our development over the last year-and-a-bit. It has given us insight on how RoR2 has gone so far - and where we want to take it going forward.

Here’s the plan:


Since we’ve officially left Early Access, we thought some players may be curious as to how the whole thing went. RoR2 was our first ever Early Access project, and so there were many lessons to learn.

Overall, Early Access was a fantastic way to get feedback, spread news of the game, and engage with players. However, it came at a cost of creativity and quality to meet deadlines.

The Early Access Roadmap kept us honest and on track - and as a result, we created a game that was way more ambitious than a small team should really make. It kept fans engaged for over a year, hitting over 70,000 concurrent players at the 1.0 launch. We also received thousands of hours of feedback, and as a result have improved the quality of the game as a whole.



However, the same Roadmap also impacted other aspects of the game in a more negative way. Ideas that were cool but challenging had to be cut to hit release dates - for example, the Grandparent boss couldn’t be completed in time for Sky Meadows, leaving it with no unique boss. We also fell behind on internal roadmaps for lore entries, leaving them uncompleted for 1.0. There’s a few bugs that have been issues since Early Access’ release that we haven’t had the time to fix. Not all survivors have the same number of skill variants. We have a passionate modding community that has no official mod support.

These are all things that we plan to address.

Our goals moving forward is to have sustainable, creative development on RoR2. We want to expand our team, and we want to see how far we can really take the game.

We plan on releasing one more Content Update to all platforms, as a final thank you to all players - and also to ourselves. We’re incredibly passionate about the game, and there’s so much we wanted to do during Early Access that we haven’t had the time to do yet. Our goal for this content update is to complete internal content we had to cut, and to do another pass on feedback from players. We have no timeline or release date on this CU, and will most likely look a bit different than the other CU’s we’ve had during Early Access. Please let us know if there’s something you’d want to be included in this CU.

During this time, we’re planning on hiring a few more members for our team. We don’t have job listings ready yet, but we’ll let you know when they’re available.

Afterwards, we plan on creating and selling “Expansions” for the game. The goal for Expansions is that they would be multiple Content Updates in size, and would occur only 1-2 times a year. These Expansions will most likely be themed - for example, we could have a “Void Expansion” or an “Imp Expansion” - with new content built around that theme. Quality of life, bug fixes, and balance changes will still be free as patches to the base game.

The reasons we’re planning on large, expansion DLCs are:

• The additional income will help pay for the new developers we’re going to hire, and help pay for porting costs to consoles
  

• A large expansion pack will be much more likely to engage players back into RoR2. The reality is that RoR2 is competing with every other game on the planet for your time and focus - and as the game ages, and new cool games come out, we want to make sure that if we’re compelling you to come back to RoR2, it’s with something more exciting than 1 new survivor and 8 new items.
  

We think Expansions will be a good way to continue on-going development on RoR2. Please let us know if this sounds exciting!


We have always been excited by our growing mod community for RoR2. We love seeing your creative work, thoughts on the game, and really out-of-the-box designs. Mod support is something that we really wanted to be able to do officially, and each content update we would sneak in a few changes to support that community. One of our other goals moving forward is to let modders have an easier time with RoR2. We don’t know the exact shape of that yet, especially since there are many moving parts, but we’re hopeful to support the mod community.


Today, we’re happy to announce that Risk of Rain 2 will soon be available on Stadia! Thanks to support from Google, you will be able to play Risk of Rain 2 anywhere through Stadia. The Stadia version of RoR2 will also contain a new bonus map, ‘Sundered Grove.’

‘Sundered Grove’ is a new alternate fourth-stage map created by our partners, Ghostpunch. They have been instrumental to our success during Early Access, and we’re glad to have formed our partnership with them! We hope that Stadia players enjoy the game, and can’t wait to get this map to more fans as soon as we can.




We’ve always enjoyed the transparency we’ve had with the community, and so we hope this Dev Thoughts is insightful to how we think about development going forward. Please let us know your thoughts and ideas. As always, thank you for making this possible.

-Hopoo Games