Relic Hunters Legend News

After a couple of months of a LOT of hard work, we launched today the Alpha Phase of Relic Hunters Legend with tons of new content, bug fixes, improved systems and many things for you to discover on our galaxy!

You can check the details about the features that we implement on this build on the previous update here on Steam!

All hunters aboard!

Now everybody who supported the development of Relic Hunters Legend with our founder's packs or purchased our Kickstarter on the sub-$40 will receive their Alpha Keys. More people to play, more fun for everyone!

For our Founders, please check your Humble Bundle account to grab your key.

If you purchase one of these packs and didn’t receive your key, please contact us at this email: [email protected]

What is next? You decide!

There will have another poll with all of our Founders on our Discord Channel! We want to know where do you want us to focus next. More enemies and places? Finish the skills of all Hunters? More game modes? More progression systems? We'll see what you have to say!

And there are much more things to come! 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.

Hey Hunters,

Long time no see, uh? Sorry for the silence during the last couple of months.

A lot of things happened, and production has been moving at a solid pace, but I (Mark) am the sole person responsible for these updates.

I had a family tragedy in May that took a heavy toll not only on my time, but also on my energy to come out and do social things like hanging out on Discord with you, or writing these development updates.

There's also something I usually call "mid-development blues" that happens on every single big project like this (I swear, it happens every time, with every team). You start feeling like you've been wasting too much time to get things done, you start to doubt your ability to actually get the game to the finish line, and you start to doubt if anyone is actually going to like it and what the heck was I thinking when I thought this was good helpmeI'mafraud.

At the end of the day, I am very grateful for having a wonderful, wonderful team at Rogue that is sharing this dream with me, and the support and trust of you, our Founders, who are giving us this opportunity. We will not squander it.

Whew.

Deep breath.

It's ok now.

Let's talk about happy stuff!




Our Alpha build for Relic Hunters Legend has a confirmed release date of June 22nd. We will let in everybody who has ever supported us. If you purchased our Kickstarter on the sub-$40 tier, or if you purchased our $20 Founders pack, this is your entry point!

Originally we planned to let more people in during the Beta, but it's taking way longer than we had predicted. At this point, the Alpha backers have been playing the game for a year already. They want more people to play together with, so it's a win-win for everyone!




There are many new things on the Alpha build!

• The main new feature (that you voted for!) is... guns! There are now over 50 base guns with cool models, animations, sound effects, visual effects, everything. They also come with randomized item affixes and damage types.
  
• Hunter Screen (inventory) is improved, with better and new feedback, shiny visuals and that cool reflection that we always wanted to do!
  
• Materials now drop from enemies all around Galyno Canyons. There are many different Materials to collect, with different uses and rarities.
  
• Recycling items now award you with Materials depending on the item that was recycled.
  
• You can use materials to Enhance your items, increasing their power and Gear Score. You can keep the ones with good rolls instead of just using whatever was higher item level!
  
• The item drop system has been reworked and we have Item Labels and new effects to make loot more clear.
  
• The item drop system can now drop our new Unique items, Set items, Augmented items and Exotic items.
  

• We currently have only one implemented Unique Weapon: the Blade Knight.
  
• The Help Others system allows you to join games to help other players. In the future this will award you with a social currency called "Karma" that you can trade for cool rewards!
  
• The Map Screen has been improved and is now closer to our vision for the final game.
  
• All Menus are now closely resembling the final vision, and the ones that are not done have little descriptions to explain how the game is going to grow and evolve.
  

Sadly, we still haven't reached the full scope of what we had planned for the Alpha last year.

• Raff still has no skills in-game.
  
• Ace is still missing his Utility skill (Improvised Plan) and his Charge skill (Holo-Sandwich).
  
• We have yet to implement the additional Game Modes: Defense, Payload and Distraction.
  
• We have yet to implement Special Missions.
  

You decide! No, really. We are going to have another poll with all of our Founders after the Alpha build is deployed. I'm sure you will all have a lot of feedback for us, and we want to know where do you want us to focus next. More enemies and places? Finish the skills of all Hunters (especially Raff)? More gamemodes? More progression systems? We'll see what you have to say!

Join us on our Discord to participate in this when the time comes!



Want to take an early look at the Alpha in-development? I will be live on our Twitch channel showing it and talking about game design and what's planned for Relic Hunters.

Don't miss it this Friday 14th at Noon PT / 1 PM ET / 4 PM BRT

And don't forget to follow our media!
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See you soon!

Cheers,

~Mark

Hey Hunters,

We are finally back to our normal routine after quite a bit of travelling around and showing the game!

We had a wonderful time in San Francisco at the Game Developers Conference (GDC). We met some of you Kickstarter backers, we showed the game to players, fellow devs, media and business partners, and we ate a lot of cheesecake!

Caio, Me, Maira and Lucy arriving at GDC 2019!

After we came back we had a big all-hands meeting to discuss what was next for Relic Hunters Legend. We know we will let all backers play the game in June, so what are the most urgent things that we need to do to make the experience great for all those new Hunters that will soon be joining us?

We polled our Founders at our Discord channel to figure out what you want. Was it more in-depth loot? Better matchmaking and social systems? More skills and the promised Ultimate Skills and Skill Combos?

(Spoilers: the answer is in the next paragraph)


Since the beginning of Relic Hunters we had a vision for how we wanted to connect people.

We grew up playing online games such as Ragnarok Online and World of Warcraft, where people would log in just to hang out with their "virtual" friends. You would sit on city hubs or in front of dungeons and just chat while you are waiting for a healer or for your guildies to log in. You could make new friends, and there was many of opportunities to be kind to strangers.

Friends 4 Ever

Online games have become more and more anti-social over the last few years, with communities that are at worst hostile and at best detached and silent. This is the indirect product of game design that has prioritized convenience and ease-of-use, but slowly lost human connection and kindness as an unforeseen side-effect.

With Legend we want to create systems that allow people to make friends, game modes that give space to social interaction, and reward systems that incentive people to be nice to each other.

We have several of these systems planned: Help Others, Emotes/Emojis, Kindness, Hearts/Super Hearts, The Secret Market, Dropship Customization, Cooking, Gifts... but we had to choose one to start, and that was an easy choice.

How does it work?

"Help Others" is a feature designed to increase the odds of matchmaking with random players regardless of activity.

When you next login to Relic Hunters, you will have a new menu on the top-left of the Map screen where you'll be able to select whether you want to play a Solo, Public or Friends Only game, as well as your Region of preference.

You will also find a big new button on the bottom part of the screen called "Help Others". By clicking this button, we will try to matchmake you into the Public game where we think you'll be most helpful.

• It will always try to find content that you already completed yourself;
  
• It will not matchmake you to help someone if your Gear Score is too low for the activity;
  
• It will not matchmake you to help someone if their Gear Score is too low for the activity;
  
• It will prioritize games that have fewer people in them, especially someone who is alone;
  
• It will try to put you with players that are close to your Gear Score, if possible;
  
• It will not put you into a game that is on a boss fight or final section of the activity;
  

Why should you use this?

Right now, because you want to be nice, play with other people and make new friends. We are not naive, though - we know we need more incentive to make sure this feature gets used a lot in the final game.

In the near future we will implement the "Kindness" system - a special social currency that you win by completing activities on Help Others. We will talk more in-depth about it when we're closer to implementing it, but it will be a way to purchase cosmetics and other premium items without having to use premium currency.

This means you can either contribute to this game and this community by purchasing premium currency or by being really nice and helpful to everyone and earning a lot of Kindness!

Special Game Design Livestream Today!

Wanna talk more about Help Others, social features and anything else with me? I'll be live at our Twitch channel later today at our new time that the community voted for: Noon Pacific Time on Fridays!

For all of you around the world, that's 12PM PDT, 3PM EDT, 4PM BRT and 9PM CEST!

And don't forget to follow our media!

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See you soon!

Cheers,

~Mark

Hey Hunters,

How's it going? We've been A-OK here at Rogue, and we just had a nice couple of weeks of fixing bugs. We still have two more weeks to go before we are back to doing new stuff, so hang in there - it's gonna be worth it!

But fun things first: we released our new GAMEPLAY TRAILER and you can already check it on our Store Page and YouTube!

https://youtu.be/Wx9yOoax8F8

We are headed to GDC (Game Developer's Conference) in San Francisco next week, and our previous trailer was from late 2017, so a new gameplay show-off was more than needed.

It was super fun to record this - I played with Founders Blurbi, Spookyy, Rathorn, wowman and MasterSuperior, and it is a testament to how much our community helps us out every day. Thank you!

Bug Fixes Ahoy!

We've been laser-focused on the Loot update for the past few months, so the game's stability and smoothness suffered quite a bit.

We have decided that our showcase at GDC was an excellent opportunity to take a whole month to fix bugs and issues in the game.

Jimmy is fighting some Ducans at Peaks Blockade

This is the list of fixes we are currently working on:

• Getting stuck sometimes when typing on the chat
  
• Some commands are not being ignored while typing on chat (using skills, opening the inventory, etc)
  
• Getting killed while charging a skill would make you unable to revive (stuck on revive screen)
  
• You can join matches that are already on scoreboard
  
• You can close the scoreboard by pressing ESC
  
• The scoreboard bugs out when it opens on top of the inventory screen or pause menu
  
• Pinkyy's Leap animation bugs out when she jumps straight up
  
• Edge tracking of the enemies disappearing
  
• Jimmy's Dash animation bugs out when he jumps straight up
  
• Skills from other players are showing up delayed on multiplayer matches
  
• Weapon animation are bugging out in many cases (switching while in cover, getting stuck on reloading animations, etc)
  
• Some weapon animations have inverted hands
  
• Improve the feel and sticky aim of the controller cursor on the inventory
  
• Controller deadzone and acceleration are wrong on the menu screens
  
• Two tooltips can open at the same time on the inventory if you close it while a tooltip is open
  
• Step sounds and fx are wrongly timed
  
• Some maps vanished from the mini-map
  
• Champion and Elite enemy lifebars and icons are not showing correctly
  
• Melee attacks are not working for multiple characters and skills
  
• Some skills cause 0 damage when elemental weapons are equipped
  
• Changing the input method on the inventory makes the Recycle button not work anymore
  
• Loot VFX are playing twice and sometimes with the wrong rarity color
  
• Ammo drop is not correctly considering the dynamic drop chances, and is dropping less ammo than it should
  
• Final gamepad input on the pause menu or inventory are triggering skills on the gameplay
  
• Some visual effects are hard to see on snow levels
  
• Cover animations are busted
  
• Some enemy shaders are not correctly displaying the "white" effect when they are hit
  
• Sometimes weapons stop firing until you switch to another weapon
  
• Pinkyy's Barrier is being targeted as if it was an enemy
  
• Controller support in general needs some improvements
  
• Sometimes when you join a game, enemies are just flying weapons
  
• Sometimes when enemies are activated they shoot at you with a low-damage instant hit-scan damage
  
• Champion enemies sometime cause a lag spike when they die
  
• Lifebar is not starting the match fully filled when you have +Life% gear equipped
  
• You currently lose a Scavenge match when you should have won it by Overtime
  
• Jimmy's grenades sometimes fly towards the sky or fall through the floor
  
• Scoreboard should close all open screens when it pops up
  
• Options and player settings are not saving correctly every time
  
• Mission completion should be recorded when the last objective is completed, not when the scoreboard shows up
  
• Loot and progression should be saved on disconnect, and also periodically to prevent losing data on crashes or forced closures
  
• Revive countdown bugs out if you open your inventory while downed
  

___________
Hopefully this will all be done by next week!

Follow Us During GDC

Lucy will be active on instagram and other social networks all throughout GDC, so make sure you follow us to stay up-to-date!

Instagram

Facebook

Twitter

Discord

Cheers,

~Mark

Hey Hunters,

How have you been?

We've been getting ourselves ready for 2019, and especially for our participation at GDC, the Game Developers Conference, that takes place in San Francisco.

Our goal is to get as close as we can to our planned Alpha version. The first step was already completed: the game has LOOT now! But we have 3 weeks to get ready for GDC, so we are prioritizing two things: making the game prettier and making it less buggy and more stable.



We decided to start with pretty, and record new footage for our shiny new gameplay trailer. Our previous trailer is over 1 year old, and we've come a long way since, so it's about time we replaced it.

This new trailer is going to be 100% focused on action and gameplay, so expect a lot of bullets flying all over the place!



We have fixed several visual bugs and worked on new features to improve the way the game looks.

Epic new visuals. #nofilter #nophotoshop

(Thanks to Founders @Shuwan4games, @Gitaxian and @Teku2001 for being our models on the picture above

The main feature that we worked on was the Backgrounds. We are using Unity's brand new Vector Graphics support to create huge, detailed and crisp-looking backgrounds that take very little video memory but scale beautifully to 4K resolutions.

Before (left) and After (right). Look at those backgrounds!

We also gave lighting a lot of attention, tweaking our character shaders, shadow color, color grading, and especially implementing a gorgeous SSAO (Screen-Space Ambient Occlusion) effect that ties everything together.

Before (left) and After (right). The lightning, color and depth are much improved!

We are not completely done, to be perfectly honest. The game looks good on screenshots but still has room for improvement when in movement.

There are still three major visual upgrades that we want to do in the near future: full-screen visual effects such as dust and wind; fog on the lower parts of the level; interactive objects such as grass moving and objects bouncing when you walk/shoot at them.

Bug fixes incoming!

We are now on full bug-hunt mode. With the help of our Founders and Backers we are finding and squashing as many bugs as we can to make the game as close to perfectly smooth as possible by the end of March.

Bug fix squad jumping from the dropship!

If you have access to the game, head over to our Discord on the #legend-bugreport channel. I am keeping a list of bugs that will be fixed pinned there, and if any bug that is annoying you is NOT on that list, let us know!

Relic Hunters Blitz

As previously announced, we have a new internal team called "Juno" and they are working on a brand new mobile Relic Hunters game. Yes, it will be free, and yes, it will be awesome! I wanted to post some work-in-progress images already, but it's so early that it's wiser to wait a bit until we know for sure the direction the game is taking.

We want it to be a super accessible game, so it will be a pixel-art, lo-fi game aimed at older hardware. We want everyone to experience a silk-smooth, 60 fps gameplay with bright colors and fun mechanics!

Here's a sneak peek at the new visual design of Jimmy and the Ducans:

Jimmy from Relic Hunters Zero (left) and Jimmy on Relic Hunters Blitz (right)

Ducan Trooper from Relic Hunters Zero (left) and Ducan Trooper from Relic Hunters Blitz (right)

I can't contain my HYPE :O

New Livestream Schedules

We are also changing our livestream schedules. There is a vote going on on Twitter and Discord, so just head over to your favorite one and voice your opinion: when do you think we should be doing our development livestreams?

That's it for this week! See you next time!

Cheers,

~Mark