TL;DR: I changed item blueprints, revised looting, and added a bunch of new maps & rooms. Also, no Kickstarter this year.

Gorthan working on his anvil in an early version of Bundariko.

Progression: Recovering Lost Memories

In my previous update, I talked about how I added blueprints to unlock new items during your dungeon runs, but they didn’t really fit that well thematically. So they’ve been rebranded as Lost Memories. Once you recover a lost memory, you can bring it to Gorthan’s Soul Forge to forge them into the items they once represented.

“The infection has claimed the lives of countless souls in the Bellowing Wilds. Many of which have taken their trades, crafts, and knowledge to an early grave. However, not all is lost to the ages. As you reclaim the souls of the corrupted, so too can you reclaim some of their lost knowledge. Use it to avenge them. Craft weapons. Rediscover artifacts. And let do not let their deaths be in vain.”

Level Design

Early level designs, zoomed out.

In the last couple months I’ve been hard at work trying to figure out what feels right in terms of level design. I’ve encountered a few different philosophies from different game designers. From “Just don’t have a background, nobody looks at it anyways.” to “Every background MUST be a work of art.” I’m pretty sure I’ve now settled on a nice medium.

The screenshot above shows a zoomed-out perspective of a few rooms I’ve been tinkering with. I want to make sure they don’t feel too same-y, especially since many of them will be explored countless times during dungeon runs. Rather than fully randomly generated rooms, I’ve settled on hand-crafting them with some randomized elements to keep them fresh. This helps me not kill myself trying to hand-design 10,000 rooms, and ensures that every dungeon run is completely unique.

Oh, and I’ve been adding a lot of traps too…

Demo & Kickstarter Rescheduled to Next Year

The one thing I, and probably most gamedevs, completely underestimated was time. Originally I wanted to have a large chunk of the game finished and ready for public testing for Steam Next Fest October. But I haven’t been able to work on the game full-time, and that combined with a few interesting life events, have delayed my dream timeline quite a bit. I would really like to launch the public demo & Kickstarter in conjunction with a Steam Next Fest, which happens a few times every year. However, I may do some closed alpha testing sooner than that with some of our Discord members. We’ll see how things go.

I know nobody likes to hear about game releases being pushed back, but this is exactly why I never promised an exact date to begin with. I was happy to announce that we’re working on it, and I love doing our little devlogs, but until the game reaches a more complete state I can’t share any release dates of course.

Secret Fool’s Gold Project Reveal: Early October

We’re about to announce a HUGE secret project that we’ve been working on for over a year now. It’s currently scheduled to be revealed in the first half of October, so keep a close eye on the Fool’s Gold socials to make sure you don’t miss it!

What’s Next?

Here is what I’ll be working on now:

• -Finishing up all of the writing for Act 1
• -Revising Sword FX
• -Boss Arena #1

Until the next devlog!
– Felix

The post Devlog #4 – Lost Memories appeared first on Cryodon Games.

TL;DR: In June I finished most of the game’s UI and implemented a new progression system from the ground up.

Work-In-Progress Shrine Area of Soulbreaker

Designing a Progression System for a Roguelike

Permanent progression and Roguelikes technically don’t fit together. A roguelike used to imply that you lose all progression upon death, which was established by OG titles such as “Rogue” (1980) and “Beneath Apple Manor” (1978). If you die, it’s game over, and you start fresh.

Screenshot of the original Rogue game.

But since back then, game developers have been busy innovating on the formula and created a new sub-genre, often called Rogue-Lite. Being able to permanently upgrade your character is immensely satisfying. We enjoy training ourselves, and therefore our characters, and having that awesome sense of progression. There are many games who have done this well, but some of my personal favorites are Rogue Legacy, Binding of Isaac, HADES, Cult of the Lamb, Dead Cells, and of course the Souls series, all of which inspire me while working on Soulbreaker.

Character Perks

Path of Exile’s Insane Skill Tree

Looking at our roots with Dungeons & Dragons, I decided to focus Perks on affecting the player’s body & base abilities, which in turn made me look at D&D’s classes and feats. I realized that this was also a perfect opportunity to tie these abilities to the people you meet along your journey. For example, the Sips “skill tree” offers you abilities based on a Chaos Sorcerer, while the Ohio Jack tree offers you abilities focused on Survival. Not every skill tree is immediately accessible, so in some cases you’ll need to meet that person first, or even complete a quest for them.

I want to make sure that Character Perks are meaningful to gameplay. I find skill trees that solely focus on increasing a percentage here, or an extra number there, can be pretty boring to some players. I personally don’t care too much about investing in a perk that increases my fire resistance by 1%. Instead, I enjoy perks such as “Diehard” giving me an extra chance if I die for example.

Character Perks are something that will evolve as the game gets further in development. I foresee that more will be added, and some may be tweaked for power balance.

Item Crafting

Another fun way to progress through the game is by finding blueprints for powerful items and crafting them at a place I currently call the “Soul Forge”. Crafting items in this way enables you to find them during a dungeon run, making the game even more dynamic with every item you unlock.

I Hate(d) UI

Seriously. Designing a UI seems simple enough. Make some cool shapes, ensure they clearly communicate the required information without bloating the screen, but then it starts: Implementing that beautiful but non-functional UI you just designed. You get it looking oh so perfect but then test it on a non-16:9 resolution and it looks awful. Finally you figure out the anchoring and scaling properly but oh, now the UI is hardly readable on certain backgrounds. Don’t even get me started on controller support. In my 14 years of working on games, I’ve never paid much attention to UI and always left it to the end to deal with.

Gotta love UI bloat

Not this time. Somehow my hate for UI work turned to spite, and I dedicated myself to making the best damn UI for Soulbreaker. I studied other games’ UI. Found out what worked well and what didn’t. Figured out what info is actually necessary to display, and what just clutters the screen. I actually ended up kind of enjoying the work!

Soulbreaker now has a beautiful and functional UI that doesn’t bloat the screen with too many details. I based almost all of its shapes on D20 dice. Instead of colors I stuck to black & white, as that fit our lore better and beautifully contrasts the colorful backgrounds of the world and its characters. I still need to finish a couple things on it to get it looking just right, so no screenshot to share yet.

What’s Next?

Here is what I’ll be working on in July & August:

• -Implementing more Perks
• -Finishing up all of the writing for Act 1
• -Lots of FX work
• -Environment Design

Til next time y’all!
– Felix

The post Devlog #3 – Progression & UI appeared first on Cryodon Games.

Hey all, developer Felix here. This month I thought its best to do another blog post rather than a YouTube video. May has been a busy month and there’s some pretty exciting things to share. I also want to give you a behind-the-scenes look at some of our art processes!

May Progress Update

In May I added most of the remaining core features of Soulbreaker, specifically: Cutscenes, player expressions, death/respawn mechanics, text localization, controller support, and romance mechanics.
In addition, all act 1 enemies are now fully implemented, which is a super exciting milestone!

An even more exciting milestone is that almost all of act 1’s dialog and cutscenes are done! That means multiple characters you can talk to, with all their expressions, cutscenes, and even a fully befriendable/romanceable bachelor! I wonder who….

The Making Of Character Art

We’ve figured out a pretty neat process for how we design our dialog sprites, and I’d love to show you how we did it. It’s actually a lot more involved than it might seem at first.

Making Jack, the anxious mess
Jack was really fun to work on, and was actually our very first character! We spent a lot of time figuring out how to translate Dingo’s style into a “sexy” version, what the colors should look like, shading, not to mention just how sexy vs funny we’re gonna make things.

What’s with the blank face?
All of the models are actually faceless by default, as we overlay one of the hundreds of expressions in-engine. Jack alone had over 40 just for the demo. This lets us convey way more emotion rather than the usual one-expression-fits-all approach you often see in visual novel games.

BUT this also comes with the fun caveat, that the face needs to be overlaid PERFECTLY, or you can end up with some pretty cursed results:

Sorry not sorry for showing you the cursed Sips/Jack hybrid...

Also! If you ever wanted to see how the layering works in-engine, here’s a look at that too in 3D:


I decided to go the extra mile with this one, because ultimately we want the characters to be customizable not just in expression, but outfits too! Unfortunately, that does mean redrawing each outfit for each pose but worth it!

Background Art
For the interior shots of the game, we’re using hand-drawn backgrounds as you saw in the demo if you played it. Avery makes sure to personalize the hell out of them to fit each character. Here’s a fun behind-the-scenes look at how Gothi’s stall was drawn!

May Q&A

I always really appreciate when you guys send in questions about Soulbreaker. If you want to ask a question as well, make sure you join the discord https://discord.gg/foolsgold

Karate_Girl2004: Do you guys plan to translate the game to different languages?
For example German, Italian and so on? Or is it going to be in English only?
Yes! We haven’t confirmed the full list of languages yet, but definitely English and German. More languages will be added as things progress.

Myodra: What style of rogue lite will soul breaker be? Dungeon crawler? Dating?
“Yes.” All of the above. Combine HADES, Cult of the Lamb, and Binding of Isaac, but add completely unique dating mechanics on top. You don’t have to date or befriend any of the characters to fully enjoy the game, but it’s a bunch of extra content for those who enjoy it.

EJ: Any timeframe on when the Kickstarter might arrive as well or is that to be determined?
There is no exact launch timeline yet besides “2024”.

What’s Next?

I’m primarily working towards getting the next demo ready, and there’s lots to be done still:

• The UI needs an overhaul
• Finishing up all of the writing for Act 1
• Finalizing player progression
• Fine-tuning abilities & bug-fixing

Til next month y’all!
– Felix

The post Devlog #2 – Behind The Scenes appeared first on Cryodon Games.

Hey, so it’s been a hot minute since the last update, huh? A lot of time has passed since we’ve launched our demo on Valentine’s Day, and we’ve been a bit silent since then. It’s about time we give you a proper update on the game and our studio.

Expanding Everything

Once the Dice, Death & Dating demo was released, we read through every piece of feedback that was submitted, which was an astounding amount and a HUGE help!
Thank you again to everyone who played and left feedback!

The top two pieces of feedback we got was:
1. We want MORE!
2. What if it wasn’t just a dating sim?

We couldn’t agree more, so: We’re expanding this game into a Narrative Roguelike! Fight through multiple regions of a corrupted Bellowing Wilds, as you build relationships with those you meet along the way! And the best part? That includes building relationships with the bosses you fight during your adventures.

All the awesome character art (buff Ohio Jack...) and funny writing stays, but we’re adding roguelike gameplay into the mix, with even more characters, and a world that changes depending on your good or evil choices. 

We’ve settled on an amazing 2.5D perspective, which will bring out the best in our 2D artists in a 3D environment. Can’t wait to share some of those fun visuals with you later!

New Name, New Site

As part of this transformation, Fool’s Gold: Dice, Death & Dating will be rebranded under a new title, which will be revealed soon. We’ll be updating the website, steam page, etc, once we’re ready to reveal it.

Don’t worry, the dating sim demo isn’t going anywhere. It will always be available to download for free on our website.

What’s Next?

Kickstarter! We’re currently working on a new demo in preparation for launching a Kickstarter. The funds we raise will enable us to greatly expand on the game and add a ton of additional content, like more characters, abilities, lore, weapons, and so on. The Kickstarter is currently scheduled to go live some time 2024, and we’ll share more news about that as we approach the date.

In the meantime you can sign up to our newsletter below to be notified for the Kickstarter launch.

The post Devlog #1 – Roadmap & Roguelike appeared first on Cryodon Games.