As primarily a console player (don’t come at me, PC master race), I’ve been itching to get my hands on Game Smithing’s action roguelike Soulstone Survivors for some time. With its endless build possibilities, screen-filling bosses, and deep progression systems, it’s had me foaming at the mouth ever since I joined the ranks of Rogueliker.
Thankfully, the wait isn’t much longer, as the game is exiting Early Access and is heading to PlayStation and Xbox consoles on 17th June. Ahead of my full review, which will be landing in the very near future, we caught up with Game Smithing’s founder, game designer, and programmer, Allan Smith to talk all things Soulstone Survivors.
Huge thanks to Allan for taking the time to answer some of our most burning questions on the game ahead of the next phase in its journey.
RL: First of all, thank you for taking the time to answer our Q&A! Let’s start things off with the standard opener: What is Soulstone Survivors?
AS: Soulstone Survivors is an action roguelite where you get to slay hordes of enemies while achieving god-like power. It is all about exploring crazy synergies and all sorts of power fantasies, be it creating the perfect fire mage, wielding a minigun to mow down your enemies, an epic warrior that slices and dices enemies, or anything in between, with a lot of depth to create just the perfect build for you.
RL: Congratulations on getting the game through Early Access and ready for 1.0. What has the journey been like to get to where you are now?
AS: Ah, while it has been an amazing experience, it has definitely been a challenging one! From the beginning, we’ve worked very closely with the community to try and make the game the best it could be. We put a lot of effort into making sure that all feedback we get is considered, and this has led to a much bigger and better game than we had anticipated! Early Access took us over double the time we had expected, but definitely made the game 10x better!
RL: You’re bringing Soulstone Survivors to console at the same time as the PC 1.0 update. What are the standout features that players should look out for?
AS: Both versions will be very similar. We wanted to make sure to capture the same feeling you get on PC for consoles as well and that meant putting a lot of effort into making sure there is a feature parity between both versions.
However, players on both platforms still can expect a few surprises with the 1.0 version, which will bring yet another HUGE update to the game, not only with new characters and content but a few secrets we haven’t really talked much about before, so we are super excited to see how it will all play out!
RL: One of the things that has impressed me most is the high-quality production values and the attention that you pay to that side of things. What can you tell us about the game’s overall artistic vision and what you’re doing to make sure it stands out?
AS: Ah, thank you! To be honest from the very start this has been a big challenge for us – Soulstone Survivors has a pretty unique visual challenge, where at one point in the game you are walking around, slashing low-level enemies every couple of seconds… and ten minutes later you are throwing hundreds of meteors from the sky, while controlling 50 summoned minions and spinning like a madman to slice and dice everything on the screen.
We like the style of having bright colors but also bringing a bit of a dark, fantasy theme with the characters. Trying to achieve a balance between the game’s style, making cool spell effects so that it feels rewarding to use them, but also making sure you can understand what is going on – at times, it feels like an impossible task! But in the end, the visual chaos that ensues is very characteristic of the game. While there are many low-poly games out there, it takes only a second of gameplay to identify Soulstone Survivors for its vibrant colors and general madness!
RL: You’ve been in Early Access for some time now; how has it been watching so many rival games enter the space while you’ve been working on yours, and how has this influx changed or altered your approach?
AS: It has definitely been an interesting experience. There were definitely a few great games coming out in the genre, but in general, I don’t think they changed our approach at all. When we set out to make Soulstone Survivors, we were of course inspired by Vampire Survivors, but also brought all our other influences along.
We wanted fast-paced gameplay like you might get in Hades, we wanted challenging fights and to keep you on your toes as you might see in WoW dungeons and raids, we wanted tons of depth so that you could theorycraft for hours on what the perfect build might be like in Path of Exile, we wanted the feeling of power of Vampire Survivors… and these are pillars we had from the very beginning that we still have today. We have a few surprises coming with the full release and I truly believe that the experience the full game will offer will be quite unique!
RL: As someone who has raging rejection sensitivity, the idea of developing a game publicly and involving the community feels somewhat uncomfortable to me. How have you integrated your audience’s feedback into the development process, and how have they changed/evolved the game as it stands today?
AS: I can say with 100% certainty that Soulstone Survivors is a million times better today thanks to Early Access and the amazing community that has supported us along the way, than it would have been if we had just made the game behind closed doors. There were sooo many things we changed and improved and re-designed and iterated on and experimented with thanks to the feedback we got.
This has always been a core pillar for our development – we even came up with a system where we compile all the feedback we get into actionable points, put it all into a spreadsheet next to a number of how many people mentioned that specific point, and talk across the whole team about each and every one of those points in a big, long meeting where we see what makes sense for the future of the game. From there, we decide on what features and content to work on next.
RL: What goes on behind the scenes when you’re preparing for a big multiplatform release? And I guess this is also the perfect time to ask: when exactly is your game coming to PS5 and Xbox Series?
AS: This is our first time making a game for consoles so it has been quite an experience!
There are different APIs you have to integrate your game to that might want the same thing but in different ways, as well as tons of rules for each platform that you must follow very strictly, different hardware and drivers that the game must run on so that means graphics can get a bit wacky, performance challenges especially on a game like ours that has crazy amounts of stuff going on… it has been an insane amount of work!
But it also feels like a dream come true – that first time you boot your game on a PlayStation or Xbox dev kit and play the game on the big screen… It’s magical! The game’s simultaneous full release is coming on June 17th for PS5, Xbox Series and PC.
RL: Finally, one last question to see us out: as its creator-in-chief, what is your favourite thing about Soulstone Survivors?
AS: Hmmm. I would have to say how much you can theorycraft about the game! Even though I have been involved in the design of every single skill, rune, ascension, and power in the game, always with a clear design in mind, thinking “hmm, this skill synergises with that and takes advantage of this and that” – even with all that, I’m still amazed at what people manage to do in the game.
I check out the ‘meta builds’ the community is talking about and sometimes I think “Man, this can’t be that good”… then I try it out myself and it’s this insane synergy that utterly breaks the game in a glorious, unexpected way. Those are the moments that really make me think we must be doing something right!
RL: Thank you for taking the time to answer our questions! Now to save you scrolling back up for the link, head this way for the Steam page and the demo version of Soulstone Survivors.
