Development Diary: August 2025

Hello Reclaimers,

Coming in right at the end of the month with your August update! The Ghost Ship crew is back in the office after our summer holidays, which means Rogue Core production is in full swing once again. And that gives me something to write about! Nice. Lots to share, so we’ll get right into it.

IN THIS ISSUE:

• More voicelines for the Reclaimers

• New drone attack event

• More guns in the works?

• New stuff in the Ramrod

• Our production goals for the weeks ahead

• News on Playtest 04

If you’ve got questions and/or feedback about Rogue Core’s development, you can tune into our weekly dev streams to ask us directly, ping us on Discord, or ask on Reddit. And as usual, everything below is a work in progress and may change before final release.

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A big batch of fresh voicelines

Up until now, Rogue Core has had a barebones setup for voicelines. It’s been a limited selection of new Reclaimer lines for the most important stuff, some OMEGA wayfinding, plus some DRG placeholders. We figured it's time for an overhaul.

The past few weeks we’ve been writing and editing thousands of new voicelines, which we’ll then need to record and implement later on. Once those are done, it’ll fill in the gaps where the Reclaimers have been silent. Hopefully it’ll bring a lot more personality and intuitive direction to the game.

Writing voicelines feels like half script writing and half improv. On the one hand, you want every line to be the best it can be. But you’ve also got to come up with a couple thousand lines, and in some cases, 20 to 30 for a particular voiceline prompt. It’s a classic quantity vs. quality balance, as well as finding a sweet spot between functionality and color. If every line is a joke, it’d get annoying. Plus, there are only so many original ways to say that you're reloading your gun.

Anyway, we’ve got a couple thousand fresh voicelines ready for recording. I wrote most of them. I’m happy with where they’re at, but I also have a nagging feeling that there’s some line I’ve overlooked that could be better, funnier, sharper. Maybe in six months someone will post their idea for a better voiceline, and they’ll probably be right. The French call this feeling "l'esprit d'escalier”, for thinking of the perfect witty line too late. More like l'espirit d'computer games, if you ask me.

Side objective: Drone takedown

There’s a new side objective in the testing phase right now: A Company-owned Surveyor Drone, designed to map and analyze cave systems, has somehow survived the Grayout. Why? We’re not sure. But it’s likely to contain coordinates for rich veins of Expenite in the area.

Painful though it may be to damage Company property, you’ll need to take it out and collect its data drive. But Reclaimers don’t have permission to access mining equipment like this, so you’ll have to use force. And as luck would have it, the drone’s quite capable of defending itself.

Here’s a quick animation demo reel for the mini missile drones that the Surveyor Drone can deploy against you.

More guns in the works

We’ve been workshopping some new weapons to expand the Reclaimers’ arsenal. On the table right now is a new SMG as well as some sort of heavy-hitter rifle, but it’s still a bit too early to say for sure what these might become.

These sketches lay the groundwork for the eventual in-game weapon. It’s important not only for them to match our expectations for how the gun performs, but also to fit into our animations and art style. A couple examples you’ll see here have vertical foregrips, for example, and our dwarves’ animation rigs aren’t set up to support that. So we’ll either need to change the guns, or make new animations to suit the gun.

These new guns are still very much up in the air, so it’s too early to say exactly how they’ll look or perform. But if you’d like to read more about his process for drafting weapon concepts, we’ve got a whole Below Decks behind-the-scenes look at that process right here.

Renovations aboard the Ramrod

We’ve been adding a lot of new details, features and rooms to the Ramrod, steadily filling out the unused spaces we included in the ship’s initial mockup. We’ll leave most of it for folks to discover in the next update. But down below is a screenshot of one thing we’ve added, which folks have been asking about. No, it’s not toilets (yet).

Some key things we’re working on right now

Down below are a couple things we’re focused on at the moment. Some of the stuff here might be done already, some might not make it into the next update, and some might get scratched entirely. This is just to give you an idea of how we’re spending our time these days. 🙂

• Updating the Mission Map UI and functionality

• Adding and implementing more cave scenery and set dressings

• Recording and implementing voicelines

• Testing more side objectives (AKA Expenite Events)

• Designing and implementing the Cosmetics Terminal (and preliminary cosmetics selection)

• Rework and expansion of the Enhancement Tree

• Expanding and polishing the Bar and Fitness Area aboard the Ramrod

• Animating, balancing and bugfixing the new time-manipulator character

When’s Playtest 04 coming?

We’re not totally sure. There’s a lot we want to get done before we’re ready to package it up into another Closed Alpha update. We’re hoping to have the next Closed Alpha update ready in late September or early October, but that’s more of a loose ambition than a concrete deadline right now.

In other words, it’ll probably be a couple weeks at minimum. I’ll try to write September’s Dev Diary leading up to it, with a sharper estimate of the release and what’s included.

We’ve been getting a lot of questions about whether we’ve only been inviting content creators and streamers to the closed alpha, and this is not the case. There are thousands more ‘regular people’ in the playtests (and many more who will continue to get invited) who are not content creators or streamers. The reason they are less visible to you is because they are not making content or streaming the game. For additional questions, please refer to the Closed Alpha FAQ. Hope this helps! 👍

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That's all for this month. I'll see you again in September with more to share. Any thoughts, reactions, stuff you wanna hear about, stuff you're excited about, stuff you're confused about? Let me know below.

With love, -Aaron / Ghost Ship Games