By Eagle One
What is Rogue Arena?
Rogue Arena is a four player action co-op game where you and up to three friends must fight waves of fantasy monsters to earn your freedom.
The Editor
The scene system is amazing. Coming back to S&box after an extended break was really smooth and took almost no time at all. The iteration speed once all the nice drag’n’drop properties are setup is truly incredible. Using ExecuteInEditor to preview how projectiles will fly or making a custom AssetPreview for game resources to preview clothing sets makes things so much easier to work with and nicer to look at. And it’s so easy too.
Multiplayer development
Hot loading is often overlooked but combined with the easy networking might be one of the best things about s&box development. Being able to debug multiplayer in real time with anybody in the world with a very basic setup feels like genuine wizardry. Playtesting and making minute changes to damage, spawn rates, and other game properties makes the process of making a cohesive game so much faster.
Performance troubles
It’s a well known issue but performance across the board is not good. The profiler doesn’t give a lot of very good, actionable information for performance issues on our end and having to plug in an external profiler is more trouble than it’s worth. At the moment, most of the performance issues boil down to issues with s&box rather than with our project, which was sometimes frustrating.
Growing Pains
While s&box is changing, things tend to sometimes slip through the cracks or get their priority reassigned. That’s fine and part of the development of something like this, but especially in an artist driven system we’ve hit a lot of bumps along the way that seem a little overlooked.
The legacy particle editor has its downfalls but the new scene particles just seem to replicate the cluttered workflow as one big spreadsheet per particle system. Particles need tools that aren’t just component property sheets.
Conclusion
S&box is clearly going places, and the vision in mind for the future of this engine has never been more clear. This feels like a game engine made by game developers for game developers. There’s nothing that compares to the absolute passion this engine inspires in our developers and the people we work with. It has its hiccups but it’s clearly improving every day and you get the impression that the engine, even in its current form, is a sleeping giant waiting to take on the industry in a big way. Eagle One Development will always be grateful for the opportunities s&box and facepunch have provided us. We are excited for the future of this engine as a whole. It’s hard to believe we managed to make this game basically from scratch in one month.
