Relic Hunters Legend News

Hey Hunters,

How have you been?

We're already in October, oh my! I heard our Community Manager Lucy and one of our Partners Sivicks are cooking up something nice for Halloween - make sure you're following us on social media to stay up to date!

We've been hard at work on what's next for Legend. Our Steam Early Access release is fast approaching, and we are trying to hurry up and cram it with as much love, polish, cool features and content that we can!



Our most handsome Team Voyager is still focusing 100% on story and the Secret Market - our Social Hub. I wish I could show all the cool things they are working on, but spoiling story stuff is a no-no.

What I can talk about though is how cool these story tools are!

Our story editor tool

We have taken the amazing open-source storytelling tool Fungus and made it ours - we have completely rewritten all commands to fit our game's architecture, while also improving the workflow and UX to fit our needs.

Gabe and Nathalia have done a great job at this, and if you've messed around with Chroma Squad's Episode Editor before (Gabe was the programmer for that!), this is similar but a thousand times more flexible and powerful. Our story designer Pedro is already working on many quests and side stories, and I can't wait to see them in-game.

Top View of the current state of The Secret Market development

Meanwhile, The Secret Market is also going super well. It is by far the biggest and most detailed location in the game, and we hope it will feel like home when you are there.

We are still holding back most details so that we don't spoil too much - that's why you are only getting the aerial view for now, sorry :p

Here are some non-spoilery information about the Market, though:

• It will be the Social Hub of Relic Hunters Legend with multiple online shards with lots of players in each of them.
  
• We still don't know how many online players we can fit into each shard because of performance (both CPU and server-side). We are aiming for as many as we can! The dream is 32 or more players, and hopefully it is feasible, but we will try our best to fit as many as we can.
  
• The Secret Market will be home to all kinds of vendors and quest givers, and most adventures will start there.
  
• If you backed the game on the NPC or Distinguished NPC tier, you will probably be a resident of the Secret Market, going about your day ;)
  
• The Market will have a day and night cycle of a couple of real-time hours.
  
• Spoiler-free lore information: the Market sits right in the middle of Hilltown, which is Ducan-controlled territory. The Market hides in plain sight from the Ducans though, using an ancient cloaking technology called The Perception Drive.
  
• The visual inspiration for the Secret Market is Brazilian favelas, especially the Santa Marta community in Rio. It is colorful and dynamic, full of art, music and creativity, contrasting with the dull, grey and sad Hilltown, which is controlled by Ducan forces.
  

We at Artemis have recently released the Full Party Update, which included Raff's full skill kit and general improvements on skills and our internal skill tools.

Moving on, we have decided to tackle something I am personally extremely excited for: combat.

The core combat mechanics of Legend have been largely untouched since the Kickstarter demo, almost 2 years ago. There was always something riskier, more technical, more important for the vision of the game, more requested by the Founders, etc.

We think now is the time to finally get the combat gameplay of Legend to match our original vision of the game. I'll try to explain the goals and major changes the best way I can, and I very much look forward to hearing your opinions on this - join us on Discord if you haven't already!

Design goal of Combat 2.0

To improve the flow of combat, increasing the relevance of Skill use, reading enemy behavior, and proper positioning. To improve co-op, making player collaboration more important. And finally, to improve the game's challenge in a fair way, allowing us to create meaningful challenge for an experienced group of 4 players.

What do we want to do to get there?

• Stagger System: enemies will have "Hit" animations that will not only make your attacks feel "heavier", but also interrupt their actions;
  
• Combo System: as promised since the Kickstarter video, we will introduce Skill Combos between the skills of different Hunters to encourage teamwork;
  
• Condition Triggers: all Damage Types (Impact, Frag, Magnetic, Fire, Water, Nature) will have a chance to trigger their respective Conditions (Stun, Injury, Silence, Burn, Freeze, Contagion);
  
• Ultimate Skills: all Hunters will charge and unleash their Ultimate skills through gameplay;
  
• Elite Rebalance: Elite enemies will appear on every Difficulty (but more of them will show up on Hard and Epic) and be significantly stronger to provide an "oh snap" moment and break the pacing of combat.
  

betu's concept of a new Kami enemy

• New Enemies and Bosses: Kami faction and more variants of Ducan troops;
  
• Improved Enemy Behavior: enemies will stop bouncing around all the time, will position themselves more sensibly and have clear attacks that can more easily be avoided;
  
• Major Life/Healing Rebalance: enemy attacks will be easier to read and avoid, but damage will be higher. Also, healing from the Potion will be on a drastically increased cooldown, which will increase the value of other healing sources such as Shield regen, Skills and items.
  
• Ammo Economy Rebalance: ammo will run out more quickly, especially for powerful weapons such as shotguns and marksman rifles, but will drop more often, especially during boss fights.
  
• Fixes: shotgun reloads, weapon reload animation speeds and other bugs that get in the way of combat gameplay more will be fixed;
  

Uh, not sure. We're focusing more on the quality than on a hard date for this one. Our internal goal is: before the end of the year. Does it mean November? December? One day before Christmas? Too early too tell. But I promise to keep you updated and give you more accurate estimates when we have them!



We probably won't be releasing it until we are very close to done (which should be right before our Steam Early Access release next year).



It's a surprise! But you can be the first to know by checking out our Social media and weekly Community livestreams on Twitch:

Twitch (Every Friday on Noon Pacific Time)

Twitter

Instagram

Facebook

That's it for today! Cheers!

~Mark, Lucy and all Rogue Snail Team

Our game is built with love and respect between us and our community. We want to find people with the same values as us to help us build a safe and welcoming place for everyone and spread the word about Relic Hunters Legend.

The Relic Hunters Partnership Program was built to support passionate content creators around the world that want to grow alongside us. Whether you're a big or small Streamer or YouTuber, we want engaged people with quality content to help us built this dream game.






Apply to our Partnership Program to become a Relic Hunter! You just have to fill out some info and join the fight against Ducan oppression across the galaxy!

You'll win a bunch of rewards on this adventure, such as giveaways, early access to new content, social media promotion, exclusive feedback channel for content creators and more.

Check more details about it here.

Cheers,

Lucy, Mark and all the Rogue Snail Team!

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Hi everyone,

Last week we deploy our new update and now our founders and backers can enjoy adventures in Relic Hunters Legend with a Full Party!

It was time for Raff, the Party Engineer, show up with all her skills implemented and now she is able to support her teammates through jammin’ tunes and pump out some damage with her trusty Keytar.

• THE WRENCH: The Wrench is Raff's Melee skill. It deals a lot of area damage, but can also hit allies to recover their Shields (blue lifebar) or Armor (yellow lifebar). Pretty handy!
  
• SOUNDSCAPE: Raff's Utility skill. It projects a constant aura of music around Raff that can buff her and nearby allies. By actively using the skill, you can switch between two songs: Soothing Song, which regenerates Life over time, and Battle Song, which grants +20% Weapon Damage.
  
• SHIFTING MOODS: Her Passive skill. Raff's humor is constantly changing, which affects her skills: every 7 seconds she switches between two stances: Good Vibes and Bad Vibes.
  If you switch to Battle Song while in Bad Vibes, you deal Magnetic damage in an area around Raff. On the other hand, if you switch to Soothing Song while in Good Vibes, you will instantly heal Raff and nearby allies for a good amount.
  
• KEYTAR BLAST: Raff's signature skill! By holding down the Charge skill, you can wind up a devastating attack with the Keytar that will hit everything in a large cone in front of Raff! Enemies will take a lot of Magnetic damage (which is effective against Shields in particular), and allies will be healed instantly!
  
• UP THE TEMPO: Last but certainly not least, if your party wants to slip away in style, Raff has her super cool Mobility skill called Up The Tempo. It gives a huge speed buff to Raff and all nearby allies, allowing you to sprint and zip around the battlefield!
  

And there are more things to come for Relic Hunters Legend! Participate in our Community at Discord, give us your feedback and ask us any question you want!

Don't forget to follow our media to not lose any news about the game.

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Cheers,
Lucy, Mark and all Rogue Snail Team.

Hey Hunters,

Thank you for your patience with us for the past month. We've been keeping our heads down and working hard on the next steps of Relic Hunters Legend, but we haven't dedicated enough time to interact with you on Discord or on these development updates.

So now I have a huge list of things to talk about, so let's jump right in!



If you've been following us closely on social media, you will notice we have hired more people! We have two new coders who will be joining us officially very soon, and help us bring more Relic Hunters to you, faster!

We have also split into teams - you are probably already familiar if you read our previous development update. One new coder is going to Team Artemis, and another to Team Voyager!

This week will be about Team Artemis - my team - which has been working on Raff. We'll talk more about Team Voyager (who are doing Story stuff and the Secret Market) and Team Juno (and their cute Relic Hunters Blitz) in the next update.



We have a name and a release date for Raff: The Full Party Update is coming to Steam on September 3rd! If you haven't already, you can become a Founder to access our Alpha and play it!

Play our intro, Raff!

I'll be honest, it's been a whole lot more work than we expected. Here's a list of things we got done in order to bring this update to you:

• We implemented healing feedback (numbers, visual effects) and optimized multiplayer code to handle healing other players and avoid synchronization issues.
  
• We implemented the concept of "Special Weapons" that replace the weapons on your Loadout. This was used for the Keytar, but will be useful for Pinkyy's gloves and Panzer's flamethrower, as well as future dungeon mechanics and quests.
  
• We finished implementing our Status Effects system, that is now super powerful, works well online, and can easily be extended.
  
• We implemented Skill Cancelling to allow for some buffs or debuffs to finish early or to be removed by skills.
  
• We created a whole new system called "Skill Proxy" that allows guns to effectively shoot Skills. This allowed us to create the Keytar, but will also be used to create all kinds of crazy weapons in the future.
  
• Guns can now shoot multiple different projectiles on the same shot, with different effects and gameplay. This was also to allow the Keytar to work.
  
• Our aiming system now understands when you have a weapon that can target allies and helps with aim assist / auto aim.
  
• There are dozens of new skill effects and sounds.
  
• Our Skill Tool that we use to create skills is 90% complete and will soon be used to make: Skill Trees, Ultimate skills, new enemies, new crazy item affixes, and Relics!
  

The reason why I'm mentioning all of this behind-the-scenes work is that most will be invisible in the short term. The only new content on the Full Party Update will be Raff with her full set of skills. That's pretty cool and we're proud of it, but it's admittedly a lot less than we expected - we wanted Ultimates, Skill Combos, and at least one Skill Tree, but they will have to wait a bit. We are hopeful that these things will come fast now that all of this base work has been laid out.



Raff is the most complicated/technical character in the game to date, and since we don't have tutorials I think it's a good idea to give some general guidance as to how she works.

Raff is a Support character first and foremost, so we tried to design her to be viable solo but really shine when playing with other people. The design themes that we went for were duality, music and engineering.

By engineering we mean, uh, hitting stuff with a giant Wrench.

They don't teach that at MIT

The Wrench is Raff's Melee skill. It deals a lot of area damage, but can also hit allies to recover their Shields (blue lifebar) or Armor (yellow lifebar). Pretty handy!

Raff is always using her Utility skill Soundscape. It projects a constant aura of music around Raff that can buff her and nearby allies. By actively using the skill, you can switch between two songs: Soothing Song, which regenerates Life over time, and Battle Song, which grants +20% Weapon Damage.

Her Passive skill is called Shifting Moods. Raff's humor is constantly changing, which affects her skills: every 7 seconds she switches between two stances: Good Vibes and Bad Vibes. Our plan is for these stances to affect multiple Skill effects when the Skill Trees are in the game, but for now they only interact with Soundscape.

If you switch to Battle Song while in Bad Vibes, you deal Magnetic damage in an area around Raff. On the other hand, if you switch to Soothing Song while in Good Vibes, you will instantly heal Raff and nearby allies for a good amount.

That's not all - Raff's signature skill is definitely her Keytar Blast! By holding down the Charge skill, you can wind up a devastating attack with the Keytar that will hit everything in a large cone in front of Raff! Enemies will take a lot of Magnetic damage (which is effective against Shields in particular), and allies will be healed instantly!

Last but certainly not least, if your party wants to slip away in style, Raff has a super cool Mobility skill called Up The Tempo. It gives a huge speed buff to Raff and all nearby allies, allowing you to sprint and zip around the battlefield!

We are cooking up a brand new Raff trailer voiced by the talented Kimlihn Tran to celebrate the release of the Full Party Update! Can't wait to see what you think of Raff and her new kit in September 3rd!

And don't forget to follow us on our media and stay updated about everything we’re doing for Relic Hunters Legend.

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Cheers!

~Lucy, Mark and all the Rogue Snail Team!


P.S. Oh and by the way, Jimmy can kick now! Watch out, Ducans!

Hey Hunters,

We hope you've been enjoying the Alpha of Relic Hunters Legend! We feel like the game is finally starting to take shape for the Early Access release next year, but there is still much to do.



After we released the Alpha, we made a change to our development process that was a long time coming. Our vision has always been to work in multiple small, independent teams. These teams will have full autonomy to work on what they think is important, and will communicate directly with the community to figure out what that is, instead of funneling everything through an internal leadership.

This is also how we plan to keep the game updated very frequently after launch!

Just imagine this: a big update comes out in, say, January. Three months later, in April, we have another big one. Then in July we have another one. That's a healthy rhythm for an online RPG, but having your team scramble to make stuff in under 3 months is very demanding and a lot of things can go wrong. We also have to fix bugs, run events, and do minor content drops in-between these updates, otherwise the game will feel dead and abandoned.

With multiple teams, we can achieve all of that! On the scenario described above, Team A delivers the January update, Team B delivers the April update, Team C delivers the July one, and then we're back to Team A - all while Team D is hotfixing the game, and doing small and fast content drops and events.

Working in such a way, each team has 9 months instead of 3 to really polish their updates and try out new and innovative things.

We have now started to prepare our studio for this live support! Next year we will have four teams, but for now we are still three. Let's meet them!



This "old school" team has all the OG Relic Hunters members: me (Mark), Betu, Müller, Caio and Roni.

Artemis is the "frontline" team that is currently responsible for fixing bugs and issues with the Alpha build, and we just deployed a hotfix on Steam.

We are next in line for a content update: the "Raff Update" coming in August (read more about it below).

Ace charging his Holo-Sandwich skill

We are now working on the Skill System, specifically on the Status effects, and you can see some of Betu's new animations for Ace and Raff's skills on our Twitter account.



Voyager is our "story" team, and they are our sweethearts Gabriel, Eli, Mari, Rayk and Pedro.

They are working on two big, big things. The first one is the Secret Market, our city hub where you will be able to meet other Hunters, talk to NPCs, and just chill.

Layout sketch of the Secret Market

We'll be posting a lot of concept art and some preview models and textures for the Secret Market on our social media, it's starting to look super cool :)

The second big thing they're working on is the story tools and content! We have wrapped up the the script for the first Act of the story, and Gabriel and Pedro are working on implementing all of it. We are very proud of the story and we hope it will surprise and delight all of you Hunters out there when it comes out!



Our newest team has been with us for only about 6 months now, but it already feels like they have always been here. Maíra, Chu, Gus and Eli* are working on a different project for now.

(*yes, she is doubling as producer on both Juno and Voyager)

Funded by the Brazilian government, the mobile-exclusive "Relic Hunters Blitz" is coming out next year for iOS and Android and it is already looking and playing the part.

Pew! Take that, pixel Ducans!

As soon as Team Juno is done with Blitz, they will come over to help on Legend! What will they work on? You decide ;)

Hopefully we will soon have a playable Alpha build of Blitz for all our Kickstarter backers and Founders to play on their phones!



Team Artemis is hard at work on the next update for you! the Raff Update will bring:

• Our robust Skill system, with revamps of existing Skills;
  
• New visual effects;
  
• New animations;
  
• New Skills for Ace: Holo-Sadwich and Improvised Plan
  
• And, most importantly, Raff will have all of her skills!
  

This update will drop in August! On the next development update we will talk at length about Raff's skills and how they'll work in the game, so keep following us ;)

See you soon!

Cheers,

~Mark