January 2025 Update

Hey everyone. Thanks for tuning in for another edition of this newsletter. This year is starting out strong with progress and a change in leadership among the team. First up, though, we’ve made a final decision on the logo that MangoMany has put a lot of work into for us.

Not sure how the quality will come out in this newsletter as it lands in your inbox but rest assured, I’ve got a high quality PSD version of it that can be upscaled as needed.

Leadership Change

Phileosophos was originally appointed to the Audio Engineer Lead/Composer position but unfortunately, his workload at his job has increased such that he’s unable to contribute to the project at this time. Hopefully this clears up at some point as we very much value his experience and expertise.

In order to fill that role, EchoZeppelin has stepped up to take over. We’ve had several long discussions about the feel of the music and what direction to take things and I’m excited for you all to hear what he comes up with. Keep your eyes peeled for music samples in future editions of this newsletter.

Development Strategy Change

Rogue System is a very ambitious game. There are many moving parts that all need to function perfectly and also they need to interact with one another. To facilitate iteration on these systems, we’ve switched to a vertical slice based development strategy. Meaning each system from the game, e.g. mining, inventory, audio, orbital mechanics; are all separated into their own projects and are designed to be combined with other slices to make a horizontal slice that eventually becomes the game. See this video by Tim Cain for a deeper explanation for how vertical and horizontal slices work.

The embedded video, assuming it works, shows a very early version of the mining vertical slice which is the first one I started on as that’s where I was most inspired to work at that time. Note that the “asteroid’s” health is currently turned way down in the video to show the concept of it getting smaller as new “chunks” are “broken” off.

Stay subscribed to this newsletter for more in-progress videos as they become available.

Work Cadence Update

Since almost the beginning of this project, we’ve had a standing all-hands monthly meeting on discord. This meeting has been critical for keeping the project active and moving forward. Participation ebbs and flows as to be expected. Starting as of this week at the time of writing, I’ve started a weekly meeting in addition to the monthly meeting. The weekly meeting is more laid-back and has less of an agenda to follow. Anyone on the team is welcome to join and discuss things or just co-work for a time. If these continue to be productive meetings, I may increase the frequency of them to multiple times per week.

Thanks to our supporters

After the newsletter went out last month, we had a large influx of new monthly subscribers so I wanted to make sure to thank them here in the newsletter. In no particular order: Mario, Grim, Jaren and Riley. Thank you all for supporting the development of this project.