The road so far, and the road ahead

 

Greetings, Void Hunters!

Our 21st major update just went out last week and with the holiday season upon us, I wanted to take a second and talk to you about the last 3 years of Soulstone Survivors and what’s yet to come, for the game and for Game Smithing as a whole.

 

 

Soulstone Survivors

 

The first ever screenshot of Soulstone Survivors, thats how old Alexi is =P

 

 

As you may already know, Game Smithing started as just 2 people working in our spare time. The game that was released in Early Access back in November of 2022 was developed in just a few months, and we were absolutely blown away by the reception from the community. This same warm reception is what drove us to drastically expand the scope of the game, adding many more characters, features, maps, game modes than we originally intended. We just knew we had something special in our hands that we could not take that for granted. And now, 3 years later, we still feel the same way.

 

 

 

And to think that now each character has a skill tree, runes, ascensions…

 

 

We still love working on Soulstone Survivors and we have quite a few free updates planned just like the one last week. And not only just content for Titan Hunt but we got a few plans for content in the Void Fields, as well as some general improvements and QoL features.

 

 

 

The Void King, circa 2025

 

 

We are also planning a larger content update that will come in the form of a paid DLC to be announced/released early next year (hopefully). We can’t say much about it just yet, but we are excited about how much it will expand the synergies and build potential within the game, so keep an eye on this page to see updates soon!

 

In short, rest assured that there’s still quite a bit to come for Soulstone Survivors!

 

 

Rogue Soulstone

It may come as a surprise to some of you, but Soulstone Survivors is not the first project from Game Smithing. We were originally developing Rogue Soulstone, before we realised that it was a little too ambitious for us at the time. You can see our very old and outdated store page, with a bunch of placeholder graphics and mechanics that we produced over 3 years ago.

 

 

 

Our proof of concept prototype, still what you can see in the game page, over 3 years later!

 

 

Our ambition for Rogue has never wavered, and in fact, now that we have the team and experience to really do something special with it, we are more excited than ever. From the beginning, one of our main inspirations for Rogue was Risk of Rain 2, we wanted to create a fast paced action RPG, with a lot of depth and freedom to build your character, explore powerful synergies and the feeling of power (which also became a core concept of Soulstone Survivors), but at the time, there was one key feature we just weren’t ready to tackle… multiplayer. But not anymore!

 

 

Today we are thrilled to announce that Rogue Soulstone will have online co-op multiplayer support, and is being rebuilt from the ground up to ensure a great single + co-op experience!

 

 

 

We have been working on the technology side of the game for a few months now, with so much new ground to explore, and we want to do it right. Today we are sharing a development plan for the game on Rogue’s Steam page, which got a bit of a face lift with updated descriptions and an amazing new art by Victor Ferraz, so if you want more details, check it out in the steam page below!

 

 

 

And… something else?

After 3 years working almost exclusively on Soulstone Survivors and with Rogue Soulstone likely to still take at least a couple years of development before it’s out, we had to consider what can we do to:

 

Increase the likelihood that we can accomplish on our ambitions for Rogue Soulstone, primarily by improving our technical expertise in multiplayer development

 

Give the team something fun and fresh to work on whilst we develop the core tech for Rogue Soulstone, before we all jump into another multi-year development cycle

 

With that in mind, it felt like developing a smaller, simpler multiplayer project before tackling Rogue would be a great idea. This would give the team more experience developing, and more importantly, releasing a multiplayer game. It would also allow us to try out our multiplayer tech in practice, with real players and in a real world scenario, but with a simpler game, offering a great test run for our solution.

 

We decided to take a few days off of both Soulstone Survivors and Rogue Soulstone and make a quick internal game jam, as sort of a team building/relaxing exercise where we could whip up a tiny short game in 3 days, so we could experiment with some ideas that have been in the back of our heads, with the only requirement being that we prototype something multiplayer. We came up with quite a few game concepts and ended up making quick prototypes of 4 ideas that we were excited about.

 

We had fun playing all of them, but one of these really got our creative juices flowing… we kept thinking of what that game might become, about all the ways it could be a pretty unique experience… and then started experimenting, splitting our team in a way that we were still creating new content for Soulstone Survivors, still progressing with the netcode and core gameplay of Rogue Soulstone, and on the side developing this third game as a sort of “side team effort”, where as people had a bit of free time they would contribute to the new game, and as the new game evolved we would improve the netcode with new requirements and fixes we didn’t knew we needed yet. And as we continued making this “game exercise” it became more and more its own thing… and we have officially decided to make it into our third official game!

 

 

 

 

It is a much smaller project by comparison, which still allows us to move quickly and with a lot of flexibility, it has already been invaluable in assisting us to develop the netcode that powers Rogue Soulstone and get everyone in the team familiar with the technology, and it quickly became our to-go to Friday Game Night game! We will share more details about it soon(tm), and we hope you will be as excited about it as we are!

 

 

Closing thoughts

As you know, we’ve developed Soulstone Survivors very close to you, our community, always striving to listen and incorporate your feedback into the game. We want to apply that same philosophy for everything we do as a company as well, sharing with you our plans and what we are working on often and transparently, so that we can walk the road together.

 

We hope this post gives you some context behind what’s happening with the game and the company. We think the future is very exciting and we hope you’d be with us throughout.

 

Finally, we wanted to answer a few of questions we imagine some of you will have, and of course, if you have other questions / comments, please let us know in the comments!

 

 

Are you developing a co-op mode for Soulstone Survivors?

We have seriously considered the possibility. To be honest, we still consider it. As it stands now, we just see too many challenges to deliver something with the level of quality we would expect for the game. There are several deeply challenging issues:

 

Performance: We have done a lot of work to improve the performance of the game, but we know it isn’t perfect still. We’ve reached a point of diminishing returns on performance work. The design of the game is such that we would need to basically re-write large portions game to have it perform significantly better than it is at the moment. Now, imagine having 2 players in a match… Even people with high-end machines would likely struggle, since power scales so quickly.

 

Code architecture: A lot of games suffer from tremendous tech-debt. That’s fortunately not our case. The project is stable and easy to work on. However, its architecture is not conducive to multiplayer as it was never intended for that. We would need a major refactor that would likely introduce many bugs, make the game harder to work on and less stable.

 

Design: The game and its gameplay systems were designed for single-player. Having it multiplayer in a way that is interesting and fun would not be a simple design task. For example, would we have more enemies on the screen for 2 players? How would the camera work? Do both players level up together or individually? And many, many other questions / decisions. We would want the game to be more than just “2 players launching spells randomly together”, but rather something truly co-op… stuff like “you get this, I get that, we create a synergy that is way more powerful than what we could do alone!”, but since the game was designed for single player, the game already allows a single player to create tons of synergies without another player.

 

These are just 3 of the broad issues. There’s likely dozens if not hundreds of smaller issues that would crop up during development.

 

If we were to develop a co-op version, it would take us many months, if not years. It would also be pretty incompatible with continued development on the single-player content updates, because refactoring the game at the same time as you are trying to update it with new content, is like building the tracks with the train running.

 

A lot of companies will outsource the multiplayer development to other studios or dev partners. This allows the company to keep working on the single-player content whilst another company is responsible with sorting out any conflicts that may arise from it. It also allows the company to work on other projects and so on.

 

We did look into this alternative, but quite frankly its above our pay grade haha and, it’s always more work than it sounds. One of the companies that we talked to is extremely experienced in porting single player games to multiplayer. At the time, they were porting a big project and were “just a few months from releasing it”. This was over a year ago and that project has just recently released. It’s not that they are slow or anything, its just a really hard process that takes a ton of work, with so many variables that it’s next to impossible to predict correctly how long its going to take.

 

Another big concern for us is that we would only want to do it if we knew the result would be great, and to get a great co-op experience, how much would the game need to change? Would it end up just feeling like “a different game”?

 

We will definitely re-consider it once we develop and release this third game, it has already been super useful in consolidating experience in multiplayer development and will put our netcode to the test, which ultimately might allow us to approach this problem differently.

 

 

Will you continue supporting Soulstone Survivors?

Yes! We already have quite a bit of content planned coming to the game both as free updates as well as a possible DLC as mentioned above. We continue listening to your feedback and re-adjusting our plans from time to time to make sure we move in the right direction. We are now a team of 11 and with everything we learned so far with Soulstone Survivors, we became a well oiled machine, allowing us to still be very efficient when divided into smaller teams.

 

 

Will there be a playtest/demo for Rogue Soulstone?

Yes, but it will still be a while before we get there. Check out our Rogue Soulstone development plans post to understand in a bit more detail how we are tackling its development, but we will definitely count on your help to make sure the game is as good as it can be.

 

 

When will you show us the new game?

Very soon! Its still in its early stages of development, but we are having a great time playing it in our internal tests and can’t wait to share what its all about with you, keep an eye out, its probably sooner than you think!