- Update 1.36 Major Mechanics Overhaul - 15 June 2026
Hello everyone! I've got a big exciting new update to share! Major changes to a whole bunch of mechanics and systems that greatly streamlines things while maintaining or even increasing depth and complexity. This definitely feels like a major milestone in the sense that a whole bunch of messy, disjointed things are condensing into an actual set of foundational systems.Protection and Block Unification:This is based on more modest change which was suggested by Random595 in our Discord and after some discussion and thought I decided to run with it all the way to what feels like the logical conclusion. Protection and block points have now been merged together into a single, universal system: Protection Points. Armor, shields, and talents all now simply grant Protection Points. Block Points have been completely removed as a separate concept.Your Protection Points now act as a separate HP bar…
- Update 1.35 Lots of Stuff - 15 May 2026
Hello everyone! A quick turn around on this one compared to the last few updates. I feel like I'm really starting to get into that 'last year' gear in terms of just grinding down 'the list'. A little bit of everything in this update but a big focus on User Interface. The new targeting/bounds system is pretty fantastic. A big thanks to everyone who chimed in on Discord.... some time ago... when we hammered out the design for this thing. The plan for the next update is probably similar to this one. I'll just keep knocking things off my list and trying to get as much animation and level assets as possible into the game. Possibly considering tackling the combat log as well. Graphics and Animation:Block: Block, Reflect and Damage-Shield animations now fade out rather than instantly disappearing.Block: Block animation no longer pauses gameplay.Charge: Removed hit and knockback particles as th…
- Update 1.34 Animation and Effects - 25 April 2026
Hello everyone!This is the first of what will probably be many updates focusing on animation and effects. As I laid out in the last updates dev notes I really want every little action and ability in the game to POP with its own unique visual effect. Our combat and mechanics at this point are very solid and so I plan to devote a lot of time in this last year of development to really juicing everything up. To make everything look and feel as fantastic as possible before release. I believe strongly that visuals and effects are completely intertwined with gameplay in terms of how the game actually 'feels' to play. I think really nailing the visuals here will really elevate our core gameplay and help take it to that next level.I honestly had a blast working on this update as, until now, I've had almost no experience working with animations, effects, particle systems etc. I was a bit worried…
- Update 1.33 Vault of Yendor 2 - 3 March 2026
Hello everyone! Had a bit rough time this update. I ended up getting very sick for over two weeks at the end of January and just as I was getting better my kids and wife caught it. So February was spent mostly either being sick, or taking care of sick snotty children. That being said, given the amount of time I was actually able to work on it, I'm quite pleased with this update overall. This is the first update of the new year so I'll give a bit of an overview of what I'm planning for this final phase of development.Development Road Map:The Final Year:We're finally here, Year 3, the final and most important phase of Rogue Fable IVs development. The foundations are solid. The systems are all in place. We have a mass of content on the table. Now its time to turn all of this into something tight, cohesive, and unmistakably polished. This is the year where everything gets refined, tightened…
- Update 1.32 Year End Cleanup - 16 December 2025
Hello everyone! This will be the final update for 2025 consisting mostly of a whole bunch of bug fixes as well as some other random odds and ends. I'm planning on taking the last 2 weeks of December off work to spend some time with the family, rest up, and prepare myself for the final major push in 2026. I'm actually feeling pretty good about next year as there are actually not that many major things I still feel I NEED to get into the game. This should give me plenty of time for debugging, polishing, balancing, reworking, and just generally trying to get the game into the best possible state for the final release at the end of 2026.Mechanics:Reverted the changes to Lunge so that it now moves and targets as before. The initial idea with this, Dash-Attack and Charge was to give them a consistent, bolt-like targeting, but this turns out to just be really annoying to use. IMO playability a…
- Update 1.31 Difficulty Settings and Custom Games - 13 November 2025
Hello everyone! I was planning on spending some more time on getting this all polished up but there are two critical bugs that need to get patched. Like pretty much every new system this should be treated as a rough draft. There are probably many more options and tweaks to the balance that need to be made before the project is complete. That being said, we finally have it! Easy, Normal and Hard settings with an additional Custom slot. Game Settings:I've updated the Game-Settings menu, accessible when starting a new (non-ranked) game, to include Easy, Normal and Hard presets along with a Custom option. All of these can be customized to your liking in case you want to slightly tweak one of the difficulty settings. I've currently got enough options included to balance the game around this easy/normal/hard but I am planning on adding plenty more (probably under an advanced tab), for people…
- Update 1.30 Bosses and a Whole Mess of Stuff - 6 November 2025
Hello everyone! Sorry for the long delay between updates. I went on a bit of an epic journey with this one that I was not expecting. The plan at the start of September had been to quickly knock off the last two bosses for Crypt and Click-Clock to bring us up to 3 bosses per zone across the whole dungeon. I already had paper designs for both bosses so was expecting this to be easy peasy. Famous last words...The first boss went pretty smooth. This is The-Soul-Warden in The-Crypt, easy implementation and pretty quick to get fine tuned and polished up. Moved onto the Click-Clock boss and... it sucked. The one I had on paper was not working out. No big deal though, I tried another approach aaaand, it also sucked. Went through a few more versions until finally, just as I was starting to lose hope I landed on one that worked pretty good. I started tuning it, polishing it, and it turned out pre…
- Update 1.29 House Keeping - 29 July 2025
Hello everyone!We have just passed the midpoint of development. A year and a half down and a year and a half to go! I think its a good time to do one of those 'house keeping' updates focused on clearing off as many bugs, crashes, easy fixes, small tweaks, balancing etc. So this will be one of those 'rolling' updates in which I'll be releasing multiple hot-fixes and just listing them sequentially in this announcement.In terms of what comes after this update. The plan is to focus the rest of the year on implementing the most important new content I'd still like to get in the game. This will leave the entirety of 2026 to purely focus on user-interface, game modes, polishing, balancing, quality of life, art, music etc. I know there's already a ton of stuff piled up that fits into this 'polish' phase which is why I had planned right from the beginning of the project to devote a full third of…
- Update 1.28 Yendorian Flavor - 16 July 2025
Hello everyone! A very different update this time. The past 6 months have been pretty crazy with tons of new content added a breakneck pace. Following the Vault of Yendor update I ended up getting pretty monstrously burned out. Lack of motivation, hating the project, doubting its value, questioning my choice to be a game dev, blah blah blah, the usual stuff. Honestly at this point I'm not even really phased by this anymore. A few weeks of taking it easier and I'm over the hump and chomping at the bit once again to get moving.I've decided to take a bit of a break from the endless push of new content and focus the next few updates on:Clearing out as many bugs and crashes as possible as they have begun to pile up again.Working on polishing up a bunch of the level generators. Mainly by adding some purely aesthetic assets to try to really sell each level type as a 'real' location.Adding a wh…
- Update 1.27 The Vault of Yendor - 15 June 2025
Hello everyone! Hope your all doing well! A pretty major update this time, basically a first pass rewrite of The Vault of Yendor. When I started this update about 2 months ago I had a pretty humble objective: The Vaults hadn't been touched in a long time and I just wanted to add some extra levels and enemies so that they wouldn't be quite so lame. We are just about at the half way point of development with another year and a half to go so I wasn't particularly concerned with finalizing anything at this stage. Really was just looking for a bit more content in this section of the game.While doing the initial design work the vision I had in mind was: this is the final zone in the game so it needs to test everything the game has been teaching up to this point. It needs to be a distillation of the mechanical essence of the entire game. It also needs to be the most thematically dense part of…
- Update 1.26 The Vault of Yendor - 19 April 2025
Hello everyone! We’re finally diving head first into the long awaited Vault-of-Yendor update! This critical zone, referring specifically to the levels leading up to the final boss fight (not Yendor himself), has gone largely untouched since Rogue Fable III and is definitely starting to show its age. As with the recent round of new boss updates, this will be a rolling update delivered through a series of mini patches. For now, all new levels and enemies will be available exclusively in the Danger-School (nothing about the base game is changing yet). This gives us a chance to test and refine everything together before it makes its way into the main game. I’ve included a few excerpts from the latest issue of Evil Overlords Weekly, in which Yendor grants a rare interview conducted by... the Goblet. The exact mechanics of how this works remain... unclear. "My work is not a dungeon, nor a mer…
- Update 1.25 Major Rebalance - 29 March 2025
Hello everyone! After months of adding new content I had planned to take this update real easy fixing bugs, tweaking and polishing some stuff and adding a few simple sub-zones. While I did do a bunch of odds and ends type stuff, I also ended up going down the rabbit hole of rebalancing a significant amount of the equipment and drop system. After making the pretty major changes described below I had to play through about 20 complete runs and so ended up tweaking the balance on a whole lot of other stuff along the way. Some of these changes had a lot of thought behind them, others were just seat of the pants, gut feeling type things so please let me know if you think I've done something really dumb :P EQUIPMENT REBALANCE: OVERVIEW: For the last few months I've been giving a lot of thought to the way I'd like the equipment to function in RF-IV. Previously, your character was defined mostly…
- Update 1.24 New Bosses - 9 March 2025
Hello everyone! Figured I'd make this a proper update integrating all 5 new bosses into the main game. A big thank you to everyone who helped design, test and balance these bad boys! I'll definitely be following this 'open source', and test driven approach for all future bosses. I had not planned on using the new Danger School game mode for this sort of thing but its worked wonders and I think the quality of these bosses will reflect the extra testing, feedback and iteration. I had actually planned on pushing through and getting a new boss for each of the 6 branch zones completed for this update but I'm kind of running out of steam here and I can feel myself teetering over the burnout cliff. An entirely new zone, a brand new game mode and 5 new bosses, most with complex mechanics, has been a pretty challenging load to cram into just two months of work. So I'm releasing this update as is…
- Updated 1.23 Rolling Boss Update - 17 February 2025
Hello everyone! A bit of a different update this time. I've been focusing on bosses this past week. I've got a few in various stages of development, vague ideas, paper designs, actual implementation etc. The short term goal right now is to get at least 3 bosses in every zone. So this means each of the Branch-1 and Branch-2 zones needs at least one more boss. I'm also reworking a number of the older, simpler boss fights along the way. Half way through some of the implementation, while doing a bunch of testing of the fights I suddenly realized that last updates Danger School suddenly gives us an amazing avenue for testing this sort of content. In the past, I'd test and balance these fights myself and then drop them into the main game at which point you guys would maybe encounter them once every 10 games or so and barely be able to give any meaningful feedback. So instead with this 'update…
- Update 1.22 Rodneys Danger School! - 9 February 2025
Mac Users: Trying to get this update working for you guys. The game was hard crashing on startup so I've patched it to disable the Danger School and allow the game to run while I get it working. Hello everyone! I was all excited to start pushing out some content with this update but a lengthy discussion on Discord convinced me to embark on a quick easy side quest first. Narrator: "it was neither quick nor easy". The Vision: I've talked before about how I want to have a game mode that I'm calling Rodneys Danger School. This will combine the games basic tutorial with some more advanced lessons while also opening up the possibility of including dozens (potentially hundreds) of challenging little scenarios. Think of these like chess problems. You've got your character with very specific stats, talents and equipment placed amongst a bunch of very carefully chosen and positioned enemies and t…
- Update 1.21 - 19 January 2025
Hello everyone! Its the new year and also the start of the next phase of development! Since beginning the project I have planned to break EA into 3 separate, year long blocks. The first block which is now complete was all about rewriting and revising the existing content and mechanics from RFIII to get it in line with my new vision for the game. The block we are now starting will be devoted almost entirely to growing the game and pushing out new content. This is going to be the real meat of development in which I'm intending to build most of the actual game. The final year of development then will be left entirely to polishing, balancing and refining everything. So I intend to move pretty fast and loose this year and just try to get as much content onto the table as possible given that I'll have that last year to actually fix it all up. Major Year Goals: Zones 3 Entirely new zones. The…
- Update 1.20 More Items! - 24 December 2024
Merry Christmas everyone! Just wanted to get this modest update out in time for the holidays. Thank you for all of your well wishes, our daughter was born healthy and happy on Nov. 19th. We've been adjusting to having another one around really well and I'm starting to get back into the swing of work. Wanted to get a small item update out for Christmas and it go a little out of hand. Excited to get back into the full swing of things in the new year. Lots of content planned for next year! With this update I had three goals: #1 Add some new items to the game (we haven't had a good item update in a long time). #2 Smooth out the reward curve so that the player is still getting good upgrades right up to the end of the last branch. Previously I think it often felt like you'd get most of your gear worked out by the mid game and then it was mostly just junk that dropped after that so completing…
- Update 1.19 Odds and Ends V - 16 November 2024
Hello everyone! This will probably be the last of this series of house keeping updates. My wife and I are expecting our daughter to be born sometime next week and I'll be taking about a month off of active development as I help her out with the new baby. Final Odds and Ends: I'm very pleased with all the work thats gotten done these past few months in terms of cleaning up the game and getting it ready for the next major push of features and contents next year. We've now reached the minimum number of generators I wanted to hit for each zone and we are just 2 monsters short of having the minimum number per zone as well. This means the games content is now all nicely spread out and even with no major gaps. This should be a really solid starting point for going into serious sub-zoning next year. On the bugs and crashes side the mountain of issues has been reduced to... well a slightly small…
- Update 1.18 Odds and Ends IV - 27 October 2024
Hello everyone! Another update in the Odds and Ends series! For those just joining us, this is a series of updates to close off the first year of Early Access involving a lot of clean up and filling in of missing content holes. Generally speaking the goals are: Fix as many bugs and crashes as possible so we can enter the new year with a nice stable build of the game. Achieve a minimum amount of content in each of the existing zones, specifically with regards to number of unique level generators and number of unique enemy types. Implement a bunch of little tweaks and improvements to the games UI and Quality of Life features. The new Game-Stats system is part of this work. Address any glaring balance issues with either the player abilities, talents and equipment or anything on the enemy / dungeon level side. Not trying to achieve anything close to perfect balance at this point, just deali…
- Update 1.17 Odds and Ends III - 13 October 2024
Hello everyone! Another update in the ongoing push to clean up all the various odds and ends that have cropped up in development. This one is primary focused on improvements to the User Interface along with a whole bunch more level-gen content for the existing zones. For those just joining us, I've decided to spend the rest of the year focused on this sort of 'house keeping' in the hopes of establishing a really solid foundation on which to build next year. I'm basically finished with what I consider to be Phase 1 of development which was to implement and tune all the major changes and gameplay additions I had planned for the project. Phase 2, which will take all of next year, will be the major content push that sees most of the new zones, sub-zones, monsters, bosses, classes, races, items etc. added to the game. The final phase before release will be all the fine tuning, balancing, pol…
