Rogue: Genesia

If you, like me, are an avid retro gamer, you couldn’t help but be drawn to this title. The Ghosts ’n Goblins–like look and feel and the pixelization bring me back in time… Ok, enough of this emotional stuff, let’s jump straight into the interview with Ouadi Huard, the developer of Rogue: Genesia.

How did you step into the world of game development, and why did you start this project?

My adventure started when I was around 9 or 10 years old. My main time sink was making maps in a small free game named “Cube 2: Sauerbraten.” The map editing tools were incredibly easy and fun to use.
I think this is what really gave me the taste for creating things that would be played, trying to make maps that were nice and fun. Of course, looking back, I think they were pretty bad, but they were important for helping me understand how to make things enjoyable.

A few years later, around age 12/13, I started doing 3D work for fun. It became my main time sink again, spending entire weekends after school making “YouTube intros.” But I quickly preferred focusing on 3D models and modeling in general.

This led me to want to work in the video game industry as a 3D artist after finishing high school (otherwise, I would likely have studied astrophysics).
At the same time, modding tools had just been introduced to Dota 2, and this is when I started working on “Epic Boss Fight.” It was just a small game mode to explore the tools and have fun, which I quickly abandoned…

However, a few months later I noticed a lot of players were suddenly playing the game mode. I hadn’t updated it during all that time, but seeing the huge rise in popularity, I started working on it again — this time not just for me, but for the community.

It quickly became one of the most popular mods, reaching more than 4 million downloads today.

This was my first real experience with programming, and it soon became impossible to maintain. I had implemented everything I could think of, and it felt complete to me.
With the experience I gained, I decided to make a similar game mode — but BIGGER and BETTER. I started thinking about custom inventory, persistent server saves, weapon upgrades…

After 6 months of work, I had a good start, but I quickly realized it wouldn’t work — not for technical reasons, but for game design reasons. What made the first mod popular was how close it was to the original game: easy to understand, easy to jump into.
This new game mode was too different, introducing learning curves that players weren’t looking for.
With this lesson learned, and Dota 2 updates constantly breaking mods, I decided to move on and learn Unity.

Nothing noteworthy happened for a while — I made many prototypes, learned a lot, completed my Game Artist studies, made a small Terraria mod (“Another RPG Mod”) that had mild success, and worked in a few studios.
Then, in 2021, I worked on a planet generation plugin for Unreal Engine, “World-Scape.”

And another new weapon! pic.twitter.com/J8xR0MOqQm

— Rogue Genesia (@RogueGenesia) December 19, 2022

In 2022, I had spent a few months playing Nova Drift, and then Vampire Survivors. I really liked the upgrade system and the idea of fighting tons of enemies. I made a very small prototype and abandoned it because it felt too similar to Vampire Survivors.
A few months later, I was watching a YouTuber play Roundguard, a mix between Peggle and Slay the Spire, and suddenly the idea hit me:
What if I mix Vampire Survivors and Slay the Spire?!

This is how Rogue: Genesia was born, from the ashes of my abandoned VS prototype.

After the success of Vampire Survivors, many reverse bullet-hell / roguelite games were released, but only a few succeeded. Why do you think Rogue: Genesia performed better than many others?

Visuals. It’s a bit of a sad truth, but visuals are extremely important for gaining visibility. I’m not necessarily talking about high-end 3D models or HD textures — I mean art direction. Having a coherent art style across the whole game is crucial.
And of course, having a hook is also important.

Is there any particular twist or aspect that you think makes your game unique?

The Slay the Spire–style stage progression with artifacts is one of the main hooks of Rogue: Genesia. Another one, not obvious at first but definitely noticed by players, is the depth and variety of builds you can create.

According to Games-stats.com*, Rogue: Genesia generated around $300,000 in two months! Did you expect such a result? How did you feel when you noticed the game gaining that much traction?

I have no issue being transparent about what I earned.
As of today (15 December 2022), Rogue: Genesia has generated $448,426 gross. After removing chargebacks, VAT, and the Steam cut, that’s about $280K, with roughly half going to me and the other half to my publisher.
(To developers: a 50/50 split with a publisher is a very bad deal. Aim for 70/30 — 70% to the developer. I accepted 50/50 because I have a very special relationship with my publisher.)

When I was developing Rogue: Genesia, I expected to make around $30K, so I was very happy when I saw how well it was selling. But I’m usually calm, so I didn’t have any crazy reaction ^^’.
I also know that success like Rogue: Genesia is quite rare, especially for a first shipped game. I’d also like to thank the “How To Market A Game” community for their helpful advice, feedback, and good practices, which definitely helped the game perform well.

* Source: games-stats.com

Tell us more about your pipeline and the tools you chose to develop Rogue: Genesia.

There’s nothing unusual about the tools — I mostly use Unity’s native pipeline (or Unity-made packages).
For development, I use the same tools I used in previous jobs: Photoshop for sprites, Substance Designer for textures, Maya for 3D modeling, and Visual Studio Community 2022 for programming.

You mix 3D and 2D in a great way. Could you share some hints on how you achieved this look and feel?

I worked for a few years as a technical artist specializing in rendering, so lighting and shaders were my job for quite some time. Because of that, it’s not as simple as “a few tricks to follow.”
The art style is heavily inspired by Octopath Traveler. I spent a lot of time analyzing the colors, the way sprites were made, which details were omitted, how 2D and 3D blended, and which post-processing effects were used.
Then I spent a long time tweaking my game to match the style I aimed for.
A lot of time also went into sprite creation.

The player’s running animation alone took me two days of work, and I’m a professional artist. This should give an idea of how long such tasks can take for developers whose main job isn’t art.

However, every skill can be learned. It’s mainly about learning and practice rather than innate talent. Practice consistently with a clear target and you’ll eventually get good results.

There are moments in the game where thousands of AI units appear on screen. How difficult was it to maintain good performance and responsive controls?

The AI is as simple as possible. Since Unity handles a lot of instantiation, there weren’t major performance issues with monsters. However, using a single script to handle all monsters helped.

The main performance challenge was projectiles.
More specifically, the extremely fast creation and deletion of projectiles caused issues in the engine. I ended up using pooling for visuals and a centralized script to handle projectile AI.

There is still room for optimization — for example, avoiding collision detection for projectile hits could help. I’m considering using spatial hash maps for that, as well as Unity Burst compiler and maybe the C# Job System if they bring performance improvements.

Another major optimization is using the particle system for damage numbers. Instead of creating normal text meshes, I use a GPU-based particle system, which greatly reduces the performance cost of floating damage numbers.