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.

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.