Here’s an explanation.  It’s pretty embarassing for a professional programmer to admit to making this sort of mistake, but here goes.

Since the release of Soulcaster 1 I have been working on upgrading the game engine in a variety of ways.  There are a few new features like multi-layered backgrounds and more scripting possibilities.  A lot of changes were also under the hood–essentially, refactoring to make the code easier to extend for future games.  Another goal was to increase the performance.

Here’s the mistake.  I went over two months working exclusively in Windows without testing on target (360) until June.  For some reason, there were frame rate issues, meaning my new “optimized” code was bogging down the 360.  Aha, time to bust out the profiler!  (A profiler analyzes a program while it’s running and reports on various performance issues.)  I checked for memory leaks (garbage collection) and CPU bottlenecks.  Within a week I had the update and draw logic about 75% faster and things seemed fine.

Then I started testing out some of the old SC1 levels to see how they ran on the new engine.  To my horror, the two swarm levels (with over 100 mobs in the scene) completely chunked out on the 360.  We’re talking 5 FPS at some points.  Unacceptable.

I spent another two weeks scrambling to find the performance problem.  What had I changed that killed the performance?  The new features were costing a bit of extra draw time, but that wasn’t it.  I could call the draw function four times per frame and it wouldn’t change anything.  And according to the profiler, the update logic (calculating AI, creature positions, collision, etc.) was 40% faster in the new engine.  It was completely inexplicable and frustrating.  There was some architectural difference between the 360 and Windows, and my profiler just couldn’t track that down.

OK, my debugging was not working.  Time for deductive reasoning.  Let’s go into source control and keep rolling back until we find the version of the code that can’t run the swarm levels anymore, and see what’s been changed.  I rolled back to early July… then June… eventually found the problem to be in the first week of April, at revision 3.  Great!  Now it’s just a matter of finding what changed between revisions 2 and 3.

Another week passed and nothing came up.

Programmers in the audience may want to sit down at this point.  My next move was one of the most dreaded last resorts in software development:  I made a new copy of the Soulcaster 1 code base and put it in a new source control repository called “Soulcaster 2 New.”  Now I am in the process of adding all the features, bit by bit, by copying code from the broken Soulcaster 2 code base.  I’m paranoid enough to test my changes on the 360 several times a day, and so far things are good–much better in fact, since my torture tests can have about 150 monsters on the screen now with no issues (Soulcaster 1 could barely handle 100).

It’s not as bad as losing all my work, but it’s a lesson learned.

So where do we stand?  I have about 15 levels done, and four new tilesets complete.  The game is going to need all new music, but the sprites and sound effects are reused from SC1.  I figured I would post some screenshots to show what’s coming.

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“This has to be my favorite indie game. It is an old school styled RPG where you play as a wizard who has stumbled onto a land of monsters. It reminds me a lot of NES style graphics with the innovation in a lot of RPGs seen in the SNES era. The wizard happens upon a statue of an archer that speaks to him and offers him a soul orb. This soul orb allows him to summon the archer to fight for the defenseless wizard. Enemies spawn from random orbs on the map. Once the last enemy from that orb is killed, the orb explodes and allows passage to the next section of the dungeon. Along the way, you meet more warrior statues that join you through soul orbs; a knight with melee attacks and a thief who throw Molotov cocktails over walls. Using the extra soul orbs, you are able to summon one of each warrior or multiple images of the same one. You can recall warriors one at a time to replace them using the Y button. This system gives it a tower defense meets dungeon crawler feel. The game features a password saving system similar to Metroid. While you are at that screen just try inputting Justin Bailey, you know you want to. According to the creator this is one of 6 hidden passwords that will activate special things within the game. Soulcaster is an excellent RPG hybrid that only 240 MS points.”

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1. Multiple background layers (sky layer which is drawn above characters, for high walls or canopy)
2. Animated decorations (e.g. torches, waterfalls)
3. Base layer tile with optional locked scrolling and autoscroll (quick and dirty parallax or simulated palette animation)
4. Scripting engine allows floor and trench type gates, so there can be one-way doors, collapsing bridges, cage traps

See the video here and bear with my first attempt at a narrated video:

And part 2:

This may not be too exciting for the average Soulcaster player, but maybe other developers will be interested to see how I made an editor using Windows Forms and XNA.

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You can get hints for some of them by beating the game within a slightly inhuman time limit.  And one is another tribute password.

To all six dedicated fans who read this site, how quickly can you make it through the game?   I’d like to know how close you guys are getting.

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1. Password quick save and quick load.  You can save one password per profile and avoid the hunt for a scrap of paper if you have less than 75 minutes to play at once.  This was by far the biggest request from everyone who played the game.
2. The “screen size” option now shows a boundary area when selecting so you can see the real area of the screen.  Thanks to Randy of Neuron (XNA Creators Club member) for this suggestion.
3. Exploit fix: The “free upgrades” you could get by restarting a level after buying upgrades (keeping your upgrades but getting your checkpoint cash back) has been fixed.
4. Exploit fix: It was possible to summon infinite souls through button mashing through a “single frame” error.  Thanks to Alex Shoup for finding this, keeping it secret from the interwebs, and sending me detailed info on how to reproduce it.

Please post thoughts and questions about the new save system, since I am looking for an elegant save system for Soulcaster II.

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“This is an absolutely amazing little action / strategy game that isn’t easy to categorize. It combines the best elements of Shining Force / Final Fantasy Tactics with dungeon crawling and tower defense games, and it all comes together with great results.”

- Curious Soft/XBLARatings.com

“Soulcaster was a pleasant surprise: a mash up of an 8-bit RPG and Tower Defence, thereby ticking virtually all of the right boxes for anyone who’s ever ordered pizza for a night in with their Nintendo controller…”

- xnPlay – The Juice Report

“… excellent …”

- Tycho/Penny Arcade

“Everything from the level design, item names, graphics, sound, gameplay, and little in-jokes, Soulcaster harkens back to the day of retro-RPGS and is a great buy for anyone with the points.” (8.5/10)

- Trace Aber/411Games

“Another one I checked out was Soulcaster, which I loved. … The music’s really great.”

- Signed In Podcast

“I’ve never seen anything like this … definitely, definitely worth your time. Very different.”

- NooBTooB Podcast

Huge thanks to all the critics who took the time to play through and review the game.

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“I got to say I really enjoyed this one and if you are looking for a top-down action adventure role playing game with a retro look and feel it would be difficult for me to not recommend Soulcaster.”

- Two Fedoras

“I highly recommend action and strategy fans alike to check out Soulcaster, there’s good a reason why it has already shot up into the top 20 rated Xbox indie games.”

- GayGamer.net

“The soundtrack for the game is as amazing as it is fitting and makes me hope this guy is successful just so I can hear more songs by him in his games. The shopkeeper’s song is the most epic 8-bit metal song EVER and yes, I’m kinda serious about that.”

- Digital Quarters

“Soulcaster is completely playable, incredibly polished, nostalgically retro, and insidiously addictive.”

- XboxHornet

“Well worth the money.”

- Zeboyd

“With a shop to upgrade, multiple paths through each stage, and a ‘hardcore’ mode, this is pretty much the best Tower Defense game on XBLIG OR on XBLA, rivaling even Defense Grid for sheer amazingness.”

- WDesm on xblaratings.comm


And for the ultimate press any developer could ever hope for, still leaving me in a state of shock:

“I caught a trailer for an Xblig called “Soulcaster” that took me a while to parse, but it’s out already, so discerning the truth of it is a straightforward matter. It’s lovely. It plays for all the world like a combination of Bomberman and Tower Defense, and I hadn’t considered it previously, but them’s two things what might benefit from juxtoposin’.”

- Tycho on Penny Arcade

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So far the Live crowd seems to like it more than GameTrailers users.

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“The graphics in this game is OMFG, it’s like OVER-PAINTED PIXELS or what? Disgusting.
Gay(m)play is like ugly breed of Tower Defense and mindless exploration.
Who the hell requested this game to be ever created? Don’t those guys have anything else to do?”

“Tower defense version 354. Nothing new and executed poorly, move along nothing to see here.”

“Well if this isnt a lets make a Quickbuck developer team! If u guys make money off of this Gem… upgrade to Snes platform. Good Luck Guys!”

“retro, sure. but seriously, it looks worse than a cell phone game.
better be cheap.”

“This looks like it sucks big time … even for an indie game. “

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