Hey fellow dorfs! Dev here,
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This has been a long time coming, and from all of the support we've received we knew it had to be done. We're excited to be working on our favourite little game again! And thrilled to announce that we will begin development next month.
It has been exactly one year since we released Regions of Ruin to 1.0, so today is a very fitting day to announce development on the sequel.
Development
As some of you may know, I'm the sole dev here at Vox games, and I'm working day and night on our other project, Meeple Station. We still have a long way to go, it could be another year before the lion share of work is done, however, we're financially secure enough to hire an additional developer. Which means, starting next month we will commence development on Regions of Ruin 2! And we hope to get a beta before the end of the year.
Why a sequel?
If you've completed the story in Regions of Ruin you know there is premise for another segment of the story. Some of you may also be asking "What will be so different in Regions of Ruin 2?" well I'm glad you asked, in short: a lot. Now to extrapolate on that:
Regions of Ruin was my very first project, a hobby and a means to learn more about game development. I had no intention of ever selling it or making money, it was simply a love letter to my favourite game, Dwarf Fortress. However, the scope grew and grew to the point where I realised it was becoming an actual game.
As you can imagine, the coding behind Regions of Ruin has been very stiff, it's inflexible and extremely rigid, so any content or features we want to implement are very troublesome and painfully difficult to introduce. This means, despite all of the incredible feedback and ideas we've had for ROR, we just can't practically get them all in.
Now this brings us to Regions of Ruin 2, we now have an exciting chance to start all over, write it from the ground up with far more flexible coding.
What can you expect from ROR 2?
Firstly one of my biggest heartaches in Regions of Ruin is that we could never get a map editor into the game, I always wanted players to create their own maps to share with others. One of the key features in ROR2 will be exactly that. We will create an in-game map editor so players from all over the world can create and share their own dwarven adventures!
Secondly, the entire RPG system in ROR is extremely unbalanced. I sorely regret that I haven't been able to properly balance the progression and difficulty of the game. A lot of you have noticed this, as the further you get the more over powered you become. This is a real mess and too complicated to explain here, but it's an important feature we want to fix in ROR2, which means levelling from 1- 100 (or more) and a steady, predictable (linear) levelling curve with careful balancing to items and mobs. This also means a large overhaul to the skill tree, we want to change this up to be completely flexible from level 1, so you can switch your skills around at anytime and not get locked out of any content (Also a much larger skill tree).
Thirdly, destructible and customisable terrain. Yes yes, there are lots of things that you can smash apart and beat into oblivion in Regions of Ruin, but that's not enough, we want to make as much of the terrain destructible as we can. Possibly even the ground itself. Also, buildings and constructions, we want to make them modular, so you can literally build your structures where and how you want.
Lastly, we want to improve on just about everything in some way or another. From town building, to combat, we want everything to be polished into a much finer experience, and give players the chance to create and introduce their very own content, whether it be mods for new enemies, items, terrain or entire maps.
Our Goal
Currently in Regions of Ruin there is around 20 hours of total content to get through, but once you've finished it, there really isn't much more to do. Our goal for ROR2 is that once you finish the 20 hours of main content, you can then select your hero and travel to a new land and explore a new map with new enemies and new quests. We hope when the community gets together we'll see enough user made maps to keep you occupied for a lifetime.
We are very excited for the future of Regions of Ruin, and hope you are too!