[2020] Dev Thoughts #19 - Risk of Rain 2 In 2021

: You can find the details for this event on the announcement page [url=https://steamcommunity.com/ogg/632360/announcements/detail/2927867089368726400]here[/url].

Hey!

Believe it or not - we’re still here, and we haven’t fled the country with all our earnings. At least, not yet.

All of us at Hopoo Games have been keeping ourselves very busy these past few months - and we’re excited to catch everyone up on what we’ve been doing.

Hopoo Games Expanding
After the success of RoR2, we knew that we’d eventually expand Hopoo Games to better support RoR2 long term. During Early Access, we simply didn’t have the time or resources to find, hire, and onboard new members to our team.

Now that we hit 1.0 - and got a bit of a breather - we’re happy to announce that we have expanded the core Hopoo Games Team from 3 to 6.

Ben Schofield
My name is Ben, and I’m here to say
I’m the newest programmer at Hopoo Ga... (mes)

In my eight years in the game industry, I've worked on pretty much everything, from UI to servers to tools, but my player-first mentality has kept my focus on gameplay. I love gameplay programming so much that I spin up side projects in my spare time just to get more of it, so I'm thrilled to dedicate my time to gameplay for Risk of Rain 2. Beyond that, I'm super excited to support this community. There's nothing better than building a game for an enthusiastic audience, so I look forward to seeing your reactions to the stuff we're cooking up!

Nick Bizzozero
Hiya, I’m super excited to join the team - I am a huge fan of Risk of Rain 2 myself. A little about me: I started my 3d career doing mods of Project M, and I also made Strafe! Some of my favorite games include Quake, Team Fortress, Super Mario 64, and Super Smash Bros Melee. My favorite things in games are slipping and sliding around and rocket jumping : ) I will be doing my best to keep Risk of Rain 2 an engaging and visually slick experience! (╯ ͡❛ ⏥ ͡❛)╯┻━┻ 💪( ͡❛ ⏥͡❛ ҂) <( 行くぞ! )

Javid “Snonepe”
Greetings! I'm Javid (Jah-vid, if you were curious). Both Risk of Rain 1 and 2 are games I've highly enjoyed and I'm absolutely ecstatic at this opportunity to contribute to the future of Risk of Rain 2!

Previously, I worked at Airship Syndicate for a few years where I handled a wide variety of animations for Battle Chasers: Nightwar and some additional work on Darksiders: Genesis. Additionally, I've worked on a couple of Source Engine based projects such as the Civil Protection Machinima, the No More Room in Hell mod and workshop items for Team Fortress 2 such as the Box Trot taunt.

I grew up playing a lot of JRPGs, some of my favorites being Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy 9 and the early Paper Mario games. When I'm not playing Risk of Rain 2, I can be found playing Final Fantasy 14, Slay the Spire or Team Fortress 2.

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We’re excited to work with our newest members, and we hope that you’ll treat them as kindly as you have me, Paul, and Ghor :^)

2021 Roadmap
As we leave 2020 (god finally) and enter into 2021, we wanted a way for fans to know how RoR2 was going to be supported going forward.

So, more roadmaps.



This roadmap is intentionally different from our Early Access Roadmap in both cadence and detail. As we explained in our last Dev Thoughts, we want players to know the game is still being supported, but we also don’t want to sacrifice our internal goals to hit the deadlines on a public roadmap. We’re keeping things flexible - so please note that the details may change over time.

Anniversary Update
March 2021 marks the 2nd year anniversary since the release of Risk of Rain 2 in Early Access. To celebrate this milestone, we’re doing a free content update!

This update is aimed towards upgrading and rounding out the game as a whole. This means that the Anniversary Update will be smaller in content compared to other CUs. Internally, we’ve already made great progress towards lore entries, quality-of-life improvements, and other meaningful changes to existing RoR2 content. We’re also revisiting some assets - like the Grandparent boss, for example - that were cut during development.

We’re also keeping an eye on our ever growing modding community, and are making some internal changes (like moving away from fixed enum indices for content and more towards scriptable objects, investigating an engine upgrade) to work toward an easier and more sustainable modding environment for RoR2.

Expansion #1
Near the end of 2021, we will also be releasing our first ever paid expansion. The hope for this expansion is that it’s big - we’re aiming at around 2-3 content updates in size, and it will easily be the biggest infusion of new content that RoR2 has received. We believe that we need a truly meaningful update to give RoR2 fans a reason to come back and support the game - and we’re sure that this expansion will hit that mark.

Doing an expansion of this size is new territory for us - and we’ll be keeping very busy - but we will still update players on our progress as we work on the expansion. While we still plan to ship the Anniversary Update on consoles at the same cadence as previous updates, we also have an internal goal of shipping Expansion #1 on all platforms at the same time - we’ll keep you up to date on that as well.

Thank You
The continued enthusiasm and support from the community makes hiring an easy choice - and we are excited that we can match our growing community with a growing team. As always - thank you for making working on RoR2 fun.

Catch you next year!
-Hopoo Games