Shotbow

When in Rogue: Status Update

Hello everyone!

Today we want to share an update on the current status of When in Rogue. Some of you might have recently seen some more activity on our Discord, inside the #when-in-rogue channel. In this update, we will combine this discussion and explain what is planned for When in Rogue in the near future.

New Leadership
At the end of July, we started assembling a dedicated team for When in Rogue. Up until that point, When in Rogue did not have a lead yet. With the creation of a new team, we also needed to assign someone to take on the task of collecting game ideas, bugs and feedback and bringing them into one place. In line with this, I was happy to take on this role.

Since I might be a new face for some people here, I want to quickly introduce myself. I started within Shotbow as a moderator for the Vadact Creative server. From here on, I joined the Vadact team as an administrator. When Vadact transitioned to Qubion, I lead the Qubion team until it was disbanded in 2017. I then assumed some more background roles within Shotbow before starting to work on When in Rogue.

Joining me is jamal135, who was a former Qubion Build Team member. Jamal135 will be bringing a lot of building experience as the new build lead for When in Rogue. He will be leading the rework of the current dungeons and the creation of new dungeons.

First update
The first major update we plan to release will focus on dungeon generation and new tools for builders to use. The goal is to improve the quality of the generated dungeons, making them become cohesive.

This update will address the following parts of When in Rogue:

• A complete rework of the stronghold dungeon
• Improving dungeon generation
• Two new types of rooms
• Improving the build tools, allowing builders to more easily add new builds to the dungeons
• Addressing some of the more game-breaking bugs
• Updating the base version from 1.12 to 1.16 (thanks to the hard work from Pyachi2002 and lazertester)
• A surprise!

Known bugs
We are getting lots of bug reports from players. We are recording all these bugs into our internal bug tracker so they can be addressed. If you encounter a bug, you can report it on our Discord server, in the #when-in-rogue channel. If it involves an exploit, you can report it using the !support bug [IGN] command on our Discord server.

That being said, we are currently aware of the following major bugs:

• Observer blocks are sometimes missing when acquiring a key to progress further into the dungeon
• Sometimes rooms contain broken pieces, allowing players to escape dungeons
• On rare occasions, players get stuck in the PvP room after completing a level
• Players sometimes spawn on top of room pieces, or on top of the room, when entering a level
• There are several issues relating to reviving other players
• Puzzle rooms do not contain loot after completion

We will soon be rolling a small update that allows players to get past locked doors where the observer is missing. Once released, you can use the command /opensesame to manually open the door. You must have the key in your inventory when using this command.

Joining the discussion
We are actively monitoring the #when-in-rogue channel on Discord. If you have any feedback or suggestions about new features, you can post them there. Next to this, we are also looking at expanding our team. We are currently primarily searching for builders. If you are interested in building for When in Rogue, please get in touch with us! We are always looking for players who are passionate about Shotbow.

We look forward to sharing more updates in the future.

Thanks for flying Shotbow!

Your favorite Slaughter developer is back with another major update!

Changelog

Additions

• All Items have been given fancy new descriptions. Buy one and look at it to see what it does in more detail.
• Added new "Passive" item type. These sit inside your inventory and give you special abilities just by having them.
• Added Highscore Leaderboards. Compete for over 50 different positions in the leaderboard, from Darkness on Easy to Thermal Pointe on Hard!
• Added vanilla sweep attack for swords.
• Doors now have a preview for what items await inside.
• New Consumable: Grenades
• New Consumable: Molotovs
• New Consumable: Forbidden Knowledge
• New Equipment: Elixir of Turbulence
• New Equipment: Wormhole Generator
• New Equipment: Void Tether
• New Passive: Aspect of Cinder
• New Passive: Crystalline Spikes
• New Passive: Blood Money
• New Passive: Obsidian Shard
• New Weapon: Blunderbuss
• New Weapon: Skull Cracker
• Full Map Rebuild: Garden
• Full Map Rebuild: Mines
• Major Map Update: Mystical
• Major Map Update: Burrows

Changes

• Joining a game late will give you some gold and armor to give you a headstart.
• XP and Score are no longer linked. While this was a cool idea, it pretty much became impossible to balance. This may be looked at again in the future.
• XP now scales with Difficulty. Playing on Hard is actually rewarding now!
• Gave the Main Menu a fresh new coat of paint.
• Sidebar now displays score, alongside K/D when the game ends.
• Adjusted health and damage of most enemies.
• Armor is now sold as an entire set. Gone are the days where armor accounts for 50% of the item shops.
• Armor and a few other items now grant a flat damage reduction as opposed to the vanilla armor calculation.
• Buying certain items reduces the cost of subsequent upgrades. For example, buying Leather Armor for 10 gold will reduce the cost of Iron Armor from 40 gold to 30.
• Adjusted the price of most items.
• Drastically reduced cooldowns of most items.
• Area of Effect and Ranged Attacks will now give gold directly again.
• Area of Effect attacks now deal knockback.
• Consumables can now be dropped and picked up.
• Good Point can now chain to more enemies.
• Plasmic Shield now grants invincibility based on hit count instead of time.
• Large Hammer now deals more damage but has a small cooldown.
• Weak Restorative Draught renamed to Restorative Draught, changing both potency and duration.
• Fruit of Fortitude now gives bonus armor instead of potion effects.
• Sweet Nectar and Fruit of Fortitude can now be consumed instantly.

Bug Fixes

• Players now regenerate health regardless of hunger.
• Player inventory preferences are now remembered on logout.
• Rejoining a previous game will now restore your progress.
• Notched Bow can now shoot target blocks.
• Temporary Removal: Moria
• Temporary Removal: Isolation
• Both Moria and Isolation were in the process of being rebuilt and sadly were not finished in time for this update. These maps will be making a swift return in an upcoming patch, along with new maps and more rebuilds.

Added the Final Feature...

Español
Moving Day - COMPLETE

We are still working through little bits and bobs, but we are currently running on our new host

Previous Announcement:


Greetings one and all!

Recently we have had some extended stability issues that prompted us to re-evaluate our hosting situation, and we have spent the last week standing up Shotbow on new infrastructure. Tomorrow we will perform the cutover after some brief (hours not days) downtime so we can capture an up to date snapshot of our database. The cutover will start around 9am Mountain Time Saturday Aug 7th (tomorrow), we anticipate being done by 1pm but it might take longer if issues arise.



During the move, we plan to have a whitelisted vanilla survival server running for those who want to join in the fun. Once we have cut over, there should be little to no noticeable difference (other than increased stability, hopefully). There might be some initial problems as we start using the new hardware, but we'll be on hand to tackle issues that come up.

Closing Words

As part of this move, I made the decision to garage Miner Problems and Warbands. As always we'll re-asses garaged status over time and consider bringing them back around eventually. If you haven't heard, that's exactly what is being done with Wasted: Control, keep an ear out for playtest announcements from RobertTheGoat, or check out the Wasted discord to keep in the loop.

Another side effect of this move is that the planned Slaughter update was released early Expect a thread providing the details soon!

I'm seriously excited about this move. The servers we are moving to have ~30% faster liquid-cooled processors which should translate into some awesome capabilities (Maybe another MineZ view distance increase?), and we had the benefit of building this stack out with our current architecture in mind from the beginning so we've made a few behind the scenes upgrades that should manifest in fun experiences soon.

As always, thank you for flying Shotbow

- lazer