Hi everyone! I wanted to make a thorough devlog of my latest game, The Rogue of Nexus, a Roguelite Hack 'n Slash in which you search for artifacts in a world of darkness that The Hand is destroying. Will you manage to end your search before The Hand will drag you in the Abyss? That's up to you.

The Rogue of Nexus itch page:

https://powerupteam.itch.io/the-rogue-of-nexus

Before starting... let's say that this is page 0: there's a couple of things i need to check out with moderators or anyone else who knows the answer about whether i can keep going with this topic, i mean... the devlog starts as finished! Let's clarify some points:

1 - The game is launched technically speaking, to be honest it's not yet my ideal 1.0 actual version of the game, and in any case several developement stages are still waiting for me, beyond 1.0 , i'll keep going for months and maybe years (hopefully you'll check it out before that day comes), i'm considering a weekly update of this devlog, so there's no doubt it will keep being updated;

2 - Should i rather write a devlog in the page of the game? I don't know... That page has been made from my publisher (PowerUp Team is the itch account name of it), so i don't have free access to it (a staff member of the publisher is in charge to edit the page and upload new builds/contents), that also mean that i cannot write a devlog there whenever/however i want, for the sake of both me and that guy it's waaay more practical if do this here without asking every time (let alone specify how to place images and stuff among text);

3 - Probably it's also better to separate things, i'll rather put here a lot of technical/design stuff explained in thorough way, compared to the devlog on their page, which i'd rather dedicate to simple announcements/events of latest updates.

Sounds convincing enough? If i can proceed, i'll also try to be more creative with this one, for example i'm willing to start from a flashback about how The Rogue of Nexus is born, namely ideation and pre production, talking about steps which involve developement on a wider scope than solo dev and interaction with a publisher (a small one), up to the day one of my game. After reaching the current timeline i'll keep going trying to elaborate further on my previous vs current approach with updates and my mid-long term plan.

Said that lemme know if this topic is ok with you, (should i change the tag into something else perhaps?) next week i'll go on unless that will be an explicit no. Stay tuned!

Ok, it's time to start, from the origins.

Actually this is not my first project, and even before i started releasing videogames i spent several years messing with snes hacks, along with an unfinished browser game, for something like 8 years.

In the latest 5 years, i worked also on 3 other videogames: the first two are the audiogame series of Hell Hunter (Hell Hunter: Anti-Nomen and Hell Hunter: Damned Soul, they are on itch as well), in which aside being the author, i did pretty much anything, in particular programming, game design, writing, and sound design (which is quite deep when we talk about audiogames).

The third one is a RPG named Dragonero: The rise of Draquir, which has been released on Steam so far. As i'm writing this post, i'm currently a Senior game designer.

After releasing the third game, one day, around the end of 2023, while joining a dinner with the staff, my boss asked me about what i wanted to do next (he heard from the Director of the third game that i wanted to make some game on my own). I didn't explained anything in particular to him, but actually there's currently something like 2-3 games inside me that i want to make, and considering the timing, seems that that was the chance to seriously considering making the first one, namely The Rogue of Nexus.

He warned me about preparing myself for the start of 2024, because if i wanted to start, then i had to be pretty damn sure about it: after all, when we talk about budgets and deadlines, developent stops being an hobby and becomes a job.

For clarification: i'm not an employee of PowerUp Team, but rather an external collaborator of it. For The Rogue of Nexus, since it's the publisher, that means that i'm a sort of customer, and at the same time i work for it.

Well, the next year arrived and i gathered my thoughts, since my boss still didn't know what exactly i wanted to do, he talked me about several possibilies: since there was a quite limited budget, the scope of the project was bound to be limited as well. He had some ideas like a series of horror short games, but i had something else in my mind, so it was time to show him what i wanted to do: this means it's time to make a Mockup, pretty much the first raw document that comes up from the Ideation of a project.

Here's my first Mockup of The Rogue of Nexus: (WARNING: it's huge! i had to cut it in 4 pieces)

The text is in italian so probably there's not much to read about, i didn't show the last part but it's not too much important to share.

Ok, so in the mockup i start explaining the 3 main game modes (worldmap, battle, dungeon), how they work and where those references come from (The Binding of Isaac and Half-Minute Hero). Right after the most important thing to explain is the Core gimmick/s, namely The Hand, so how it works, how it behaves and how it interacts with the player (well in the actual game if it catches you, you won't explode in a bubble of blood haha). Aside the Hand, i added the consequences of its destruction (darkness and dark dungeons) and how that works.

Then i added other contents like the artifacts, talked about RNG, the specifics of game assets, the scope of the project and its length. Fun fact: the genre and other details shoud be at the very beginning but i put them almost at the bottom... not a good idea. I don't know if it would be better to have a name (a temp one at least), but maybe it's not the case of spending some time on it, considered that you don't even know if the idea will be approved, when you're not going completely solo.

About the scope of the project, i noticed i did a reasonable thing: not deciding a static size of the project, more precisely, instead of saying "this game is supposed to last 40 hours, the worldmap has this size and is split in 10 areas" i instead specified what depends on the budget amount, so for example for x budget you'll get n1 artifacts, n2 allies, n3 enemies and n4 areas in worldmap; and for budget y you'll get instead m1 artifacts, m2 allies, m3 enemies and m4 areas.

It's extremely important to know what will make escale the budget (and time!) of your project, because you'll easily lose control on that if you plan poorly the scope. In fact, i imagined at the beginning that the game should had 10 areas... at its release they are 4. I'm not even saying that if they stayed 10, the project would have been collapsed (which is a given), but rather that they wouldn't even approved the budget for start its developement.

1 year and 9 months later the game is here, so my boss liked the mockup (he told me anyway that the project looked quite complicated, hence it required several proofs its developement sustainability, namely me being able to code and implement this stuff)... that was the beginning of this project.

There was a rule though: it was supposed to be developed on an early stage for a mobile release, and then its full version on PC... and since you're reading this, maybe, you just realized that it kinda happened the opposite haha, and that because incidents happen anytime during the developement of a game, and the following posts will tell more about such incidents along the way.

PS. The mockup has been written taking into account the features of the 100% completed game, like allies and story mode, along with other extra interactions, but i specified what was supposed to be cut out from the 1.0 version, because that was obviously too much stuff to handle, as a matter of fact there's still no trace of allies in the 1.1.1 version of the game.

Ok, i was supposed to post the following part about pre-production, but i'm too busy with the 1.1.2 update which is supposed to be released this friday, so in the meantime i'm gonna make a shorter post about the current WIP, (i'll post about pre-production the next week).

Aside the Adventure mode i mentioned elsewhere on Itch, probably the Discord and Reddit, i'm dealing with several UI/UX polishing and improvements, the one on the screen is a feature that allows to not getting stuck among darkness, at night.

So the feature is a sort of emergency time shift forward, the day/night time will immediately arrive to dawn, in this way night will fade, along whose eyes and jaws which lurk among darkness... but at the price of a life.

Well, without context it seems a bit weird, if not uncovenient as feature, let's say 50% yes and 50% no. I didn't provide extra details in other places i posted, but here in the devlog i have the chance to elaborate further:

1 - Why shifting from night to day? There are several rules about this world of darkness: it's not just about making disappear those creepy dark beings, mostly they revolve around The Hand. This being can destroy your path and it will turn into darkness. It is possible to attempt traveling along darkness, in worldmap but aside being very dangerous, you can do that only during day, in fact if night comes while you're in darkness then The Hand will catch you immediately. If it's already night you won't be able to interact with tiles of darkness;

2 - Why shifting instead of waiting? You can just wait, or doing something else meanwhile... or you can rest in a Safe Spot to also make day/night  time shift forward of 6 hours, yet sometimes if darkness destruction surrounds you, you might be locked and isolated from the rest of the world, until dawn comes, and that's why your movement choices in worldmap are extremely important, during a run. Waiting several minutes (up to a max of 15) might not be exactly entertaining, so i added an option to skip that part;

3 - Why a penality? Without a penality, it would be a trick, an exploit and speedrunning tool that basically allows to skip night and that's not something i'd want to make happen, let alone skipping darkness: the path wouln't even be hindered in such case and the core gimmick would crumble;

4 - Life penality, too harsh? Not exactly, Abyss Upgrades allow to boost your starting run amount of lives, you start with more than one and, while losing the last life will make The Hand to suddenly attempt to grab you, losing a life this way won't make The Hand come out. You can even free yourself from the grab attempt if you're strong enough to handle the fight. Your lives can reach a negative value, in that case the following battles against The Hand will become harder to endure, so the Time Penality will shorten this process, if used several times;

5 - Flash Step penality, too harsh? Nope, Flash Step is an emergency button for escape almost from anything, darkness included, it's supposed to recharge at dawn, but not in this case, otherwise that would open to almost endless travelling along paths of darkness. 

In the end, the Time Penality feature is only supposed to allow a fast transition in points of the run that would otherwise make the player get stuck temporally, not a way to escape from a bad scenario: if you got surrounded by darkness, you'll still have to venture through darkness when dawn will come.

If you just want to use the feature to skip time, then your lives will be the currency for that.

See us when the next update and devlog page will come!

Hi!  Here i am, i can finally proceed with the making of The Rogue of Nexus. (part 2)

Very well, so i shown the mock up to my boss and he liked it, reccomendations aside.

Time to start with developement, right? Nope.

That could be a thing on solo developement and/or making a game as hobby, but i'm not alone, and allies aside, there's a budget to validate and approve, which is provided from above, and the guys above need to know how that money will be spent (more precisely which tasks will be performed, which assets will be created and how much they cost) and more importantly how time will be spent, in order to meet deadline.

This "wonderful" phase is called Pre-Production and, while success cannot be determined just by that, a poormade pre-production will grant a hullova of problems and probably the failure of a paid project as well.

One of the previous projects i joined, a year after it's developement start, i think it suffered heavily this issue: the producer changed 1-2 times and the GDD changed a couple of times as well, i had to rewrite it on my own... the biggest issue is that the production and developement never communicated clearly on the goal to achieve and milestones to follow, so i basically tried to make a huge GDD, when problems started to come, the game had to be launched quite suddenly and in the mean time it was impossible to meet the expectation of the GDD, since the scope of the game shrank drammatically. The product has been launched with severe flaws and some of them still lurk in the shadow... 

Please plan pre-production if you can.

The name of the phase strongly implies that a producer should deal with that, i'm a producer? No.

The producer of the italian team Studio Evil once taught at us (it was a game design course) that a Game Designer should never be a Producer at the same time (and vice-versa), i can agree with that: basically a Game Designer would want to build an incredible universe in its game; the Producer is there to remember that the team has X budget and Y time, so probably that universe is bound to become a bit/much less incredible that  Game Designer's best scenario. Basically they are like the Hero and the Villain... there's a clear conflict of interest here.

However i personally think that it's quite important for a game designer to learn that stuff, even in case it will never happen to do that... both for gaining a bit of common sense and also because a game designer needs to know the gist of all developement processes, even to interact better with the whole team.

Well actually it's not like i was going to go through the whole process here, some week later a producer would join the project and provide a lot of help, in any case if you're the author of the game, then only you is aware of what the game is supposed to contain and (hopefully) the implications, namely the concrete effort and the list of assets to assemble the whole thing, so you must be aware of what they will cost, in all means.

My boss shared some info in how to do that, so i practiced a bit. 

Here's a quick list of stuff i use in the meantime:

- Google Drive for store the documents of the project, which are destined to become a lot;

- Google docs (mostly for the equivalent of Word and Excel);

- Notepad, can't be more simple than that for writing quickly some text, planning stuff and listing ideas;

- Paint, i don't think a game designer necessarily needs more than that for a mockup or slap references quickly, keep it simple at this stage of developement.

What i need here is the Excel-like sheet, you need to line up assets, number costs and time cost, and other stuff.

This is what i came up with as first attempt:

Well, i mashed up the 3 sheets of the doc to fit in one image, but basically it features:

1 - The costs of the core, namely the essential part of the game, that cannot be cut in subsets of the whole part,  like core gimmicks, the main character, darkness etc;

2 - The costs for each area, stuff that increase of number as the number of areas of the game increase, like x objects or y enemies... they are supposed to amount to the same value, so if making an area costs Z, then making 10 areas should cost Z * 10;

3 - Overall costs recap, this sums up the whole cost and can esily show how the costs scales according to the cuts or extra contents to the previous sheets, make sure to let the sheets use the formula to sum, multiply and all that jazz, and more importatly to make them talk with the third sheet.

This document must be quite readable, each line is supposed to describe what are you talking about, so the subject (an asset, a gimmick, a whole block of tasks), a brief description, the quantity, the cost and the total.

You show this to the publisher, maybe you'll do it much more professional than this, but that's the juice, and at the end of the story what they actually care is the last sheet, which in other words tells if costs vs budget are ok.

If you checked the content of the sheet, you might have realized that here we're talking just of costs in terms of time, after all it's useless to detail on money if you can't even balance the costs in term of time.

My budget in terms of time, technically speaking ammounted to 6 months, raw math says that even assuming you work like a machine, that equals to 180 days.

If you remember what i said in the previous part of this flashback, then you know i talked about making 10 areas... according to that sheet that's plain impossible, the numbers talks clearly: Even if text and numbers don't match, technically that was the cost of 4 areas and it did amount to more or less 515 days.

The core alone was too big already... it's time to make cuts to contents, lower the amount of areas and also receive a hand: (not The Hand!) i cannot do everything alone, starting from pixel art, but such truth was known already and i already talked about that with my boss: the developement team of The Rogue of Nexus is about to recruit members.

That was more or less the first week of pre-production, but obviously it doesn't end here... but we'll stop here for now. The next part will tell more about what happened then. Stay tuned!