Today, demo. Tomorrow, early access.

Metaphorically speaking. 😅

Let's see what to expect later this year.

(All artwork presented below is concept art and is subject to change)

You may be surprised to learn that Rogue Maze doesn't begin and end in the level view. Oh no. We've got a ton of content planned in between, and that starts with The Map.

Surely we are all familiar by now with the classic Slay the Spire-type map view. The overlapping paths, the fight nodes, the shop nodes. It's been done a million times, but it's been done that way because it works.

On Rogue Maze, we strive to reimagine mechanics like this, and to always bring something new to the table. And so, I present our map view, the Rogue Maze map view. Imagine all your map rewards, but twisted up into a grid, where you choose your own path with Tetris-like pieces.

While the nodes maintain a typical structure (shops, chests, etc), the path to get there is anything but. Starting at the bottom left of the grid, and making your way towards HQ at the top right, after each stage you are awarded with a set of tetrominos*, one of which you can place on the board. Overlap your piece with rewards on the board and your character will interact with them, pick them up along the way. Choose a rapid path to the exit, or take your time and collect every reward: the choice is yours.

Each tetromino also contains a battle on it, commensurate with the size of the piece. Careful placement of pieces can also power up spots on the board: line up the -30% with a shop to receive a discount, or a 2x on a treasure chest to receive two rewards!

* "Tetromino" has a pretty specific meaning, and this ain't it, but I don't know what else to call them :)

What do you find on the board? Asserted treasures and knick-knacks... and shops of course!

Tile shop! Buy new tiles, or upgrade existing tiles in your deck with various power-ups. You can also toss a tile into The Shredder to remove it from your deck.

A sentient vending machine dispenses engineering tools are your leisure. Careful, because it might jam...

What are Engineering Tools, you ask? Some might call them relics. Eng Tools are permanent power-ups that grant you a wide range of passive bonuses. Here are a few:

• Pain in the Rear: Tiles connected to the exit but not the entrance gain +X% increased damage

• Undowear: Tiles you "undo" explode, dealing X damage

• Quite Fowl: Smelly tiles become increasingly foul over the course of the level, doing area damage to rogues \[Art requirement: chickens sitting on toilets]

• No, not the Bees!: You can add an extra level 5 tile to each of your Cluster Tiles

The Gadget Shop serves two purposes. First is to sell various Eng. Tools that manipulate your gadgets: gain extras at level start, increase the drop-rate of one type, etc. But open the microwave and find a special surprise!

Cook any gadget in the microwave to transform it into one of two preset upgrades. Your Shovel can upgrade to either a Pickaxe—use on empty board spaces for a chance to find a treasure chest—or perhaps you'd prefer to engage in some Asbestos Removal: shoveling tiles with rogues inside infects the rogues with damage-over-time.

Upgrade any gadget to power it up for the rest of your run!

Taco? Blemmy is bringing the heat. Restore HP and gain some passive bonuses for a few stages.

Oooh, we're saving the best for last. Islands. The island shop will let you buy and manipulate islands, so let's check islands out.

Islands are a brand new board mechanic/item type that populates each of your levels with special island areas. Sometimes randomly generated, sometimes unique, islands let you:

• Place extra tiles in specific patterns to gain rewards

• Dump extra unwanted tiles

• Feed your most valuable tiles to baby monsters to grow them into formidable allies

• And much more!

Gain new islands from board rewards, shops, and elsewhere. Islands are going to spice up the game and add a ton of variety. We can't wait!

We've got story content coming! Look at that art! Damn, Adrian is so good.

• More special tiles

• More enemies

• More levels

• More hazards

• Portals

• Bridges

• Multi-entrance/exit

• Large tiles (2x1, 3x3, etc)

• And more!

Aaaah! I'm very excited. Goodbye.

The following update was recently shared with our playtest community, but I wanted to share it here as well. We've been hard at work at Rogue Maze for coming on two years now and we're just about ready for a demo! While the playtest is limited, the demo will be going live to the public with equal content very soon. Keep an eye out!

Hello, and welcome (back) to the Rogue Maze Playtest! I never intended this update to take 9 months, but alas, here we are. Somewhere in between our rough-cut friends-only playtest and today we went and made a whole game. It's been a long ride, but let's cut the boring stuff and go explore how much has changed!

In each section below you can find a Before and After screenshot for each major game area.

(Before | After)

From head to toe, Rogue Maze is now fully skinned and dressed to impress! Every menu has been polished up and animated by hand, and I'm really proud of the quality we're bringing here. Bionic Wombat Games may be a small team of just 6 individuals, but we strive for the level of polish and care you'd expect from a team three times our size.

(Before | After)

The biggest gameplay change from the initial playtest to today is a large rethinking of how enemies spawn and the general game pace. Rogue Maze v0.7 operated in a real-time cadence: pause mode was for planning, play mode was for building, and you better build fast or the enemies will escape!

The new Rogue Maze lets the player control the pace. Enemies only spawn every "x" tiles placed, allowing the player to slow down, plan out, and execute the best maze they can without having to worry about time running out.

To go with the new piece-based placement mode is an all-new UI showing the most important info: how many tiles until a new wave spawns, the waves that are currently on the board, and all the waves that are upcoming. Mouse-over enemy photos for detailed wave information.

With the removal of the time-based gameplay also comes the removal of my lovely Heat Meter, one of the first elements we really built and polished (and one of my favorites). I hope to bring it back somehow in the future.

(Before | After)

Gone are the dull tile ideas that only added status effects: welcome to the new era of Special Tiles that reward careful placement and that test your building skills. Honey Farm tiles power up only if you build them in clusters, whereas Laser Tiles require line of sight between two turns to connect the laser. Or perhaps try out the new Slip-and-Slide, building many in a straight line to slam the enemies against the nearest wall!

We've currently got 15 unique special tiles, with a ton more on the way.

(Before | After)

Gadgets were in a weird place in the original playtest: despite being very powerful and fun to use, players would horde them because they'd never know if they'd need them in future levels. Next thing you know, the run would be over and the player would be sitting on piles of 30+ leftover gadgets.

To address this classic anti-pattern, gadgets now reset back to 1 after every level, incentivizing you to play 'em while you got 'em. In addition, we've removed redundancy amongst the gadgets, lowered the variety from 8 to 6, but have given each character their own unique gadget load-out that meshes with their theme. This, in addition to the upcoming Engineering Tools (see the next post, Coming Soon!) help provide differentiation between the characters outside of just the art style.

I didn't know anything about sound in games before I started working on Rogue Maze. Zero. Nada. I spent a year and a half on Plant Shop (currently on indefinite hiatus 😢) and never put a single sound in it. (I also never had a single person play it, but we don't talk about that.)

In the previous playtest, all of the sounds—largely sourced from random websites—simply played whenever their corresponding event happened. I knew I wanted more than this—I knew I wanted positional effects, dynamic loops—but until we hired our sound guy[bionicwombatgames.com] I never knew the first thing about how to create it.

Or, well, actually, it turned out I was halfway to recreating FMod before Carter stepped in and schooled me in its mystical ways. FMod is awesome and now our SOUND is awesome too! We've got fully positional audio, one-shots, loops, variations and randomness, distance layering, effects processing, and an integrated music engine to boot. Crank up the volume and delight your ears!

Full PC, Mac, and Steam Deck support! KBM and Controller support!

(all new!)

There's a handbook now so you can see all the cool stuff!

(all new!)

Place special tiles on these special spaces to receive all sorts of special bonuses.

(Before | After)

Here's some other stuff. Gaze upon how it looked bad and now it looks good.

(It's been a few minutes now since I wrote that sentence, and I've just been sitting here reflecting on how much work this has been to get here and how awesome my team is. Nine months is a scary amount of time to go from "playtest 1" to "playtest 2" but we have done SO much work in that time and I am immensely proud of what we have produced. There is much more work to do yet, but I'm so excited about the future of the project and can't wait to share what's next.)

And finally, I will leave you with a screenshot that the marketing team tells me not to post because it's too crazy. What fun is life without a little CRAZY?! ;)

PS: In case you missed the link hidden deep in the text above, click [bionicwombatgames.com]here to read about the team.[bionicwombatgames.com]