Roguefort is out now in Early Access

Hey everyone,

THE DAY HAS COME! I'm thrilled to announce that Roguefort is now out in Early Access. I always dreamed of making my own roguelike and bringing into play the depth of simulation and lore and player agency that I longed for in an open world RPG. Roguefort is that dream game and I'm just so happy to be able to finally share it.

For anyone just tuning in, Roguefort is an open-world roguelike RPG where magic comes from cheesemaking. Explore a living continent, join Guilds, crawl dungeons, build a homestead, sail with friends, and a lot more. Or start a settlement in Fortress mode and manage its people, farms and workshops. There's also The Crossing, a fresh procedurally generated continent each run, and The Wilds, a survival mode where you wash up all alone with 10 items of your choosing.

What's in the game right now

There's a lot here already from day 1. Fortress mode in particular is basically a whole second game set in the same universe and time period.

• Adventure. The main game. A single-player open-world roguelike set on the handcrafted continent of Cantal, with the campaign, the five Guilds, cheesemaking, vampirism, sailing, homesteads and roughly 10,000 dungeons.
• The Crossing. Adventure in a fully procedurally generated world, with cities nobody has ever seen before. It's the least tested mode, so expect rough edges.
• Fortress. A colony sim in the spirit of RimWorld and a lighter Dwarf Fortress. You run a settlement rather than a single character.
• The Wilds (survival mode). You are on a voyage that gets totally wrecked and you wash up on a distant shore with nothing but 10 items you choose. There's no magic, no other people and no dungeons. It's just you and the wild, and winter is coming. How long can you last?

On top of that you can choose how punishing a run is: Wayfarer (permadeath off), permadeath, or the new Hardcore mode.

You can play online co-op with up to 4 players. One player hosts the world and their friends join them over Steam's peer-to-peer networking. There's also The Old Mouth, an online hub where you can trade with other players through the auction house, and take on the first raid dungeon, The Monadic Descent. It's a solo, competitive dungeon with speedrun and mastery scores.

Why Early Access?

A few people have told me it already feels like more than a 1.0 game, which is always lovely to hear. But there's about a year's worth of work left to fully flesh out, tune and polish the systems, and I want to do that alongside the community to ensure I can make the best game possible.

The road to 1.0

1.0 is planned for 13 October 2027 at 11pm Brisbane time , exactly one year after Early Access launch. A full roadmap post is coming separately, but here are some of the big things I'm working towards.

• Smoother online co-op. Migrating co-op off peer-to-peer and onto proper online servers, so it's easier to join and doesn't depend so much on the host's connection and other related factors.
• Four raid dungeons instead of one. The Monadic Descent is a solo dungeon where you do runs by yourself. Each new raid dungeon adds a player: the Dyadic raid for 2-player co-op, then 3 players, then 4.
• Modes that feed into each other. Bringing the systems from Adventure, Fortress and Survival together so every mode gets more depth, including Z-levels in Adventure mode, so you can mine down and explore the world below the surface.
• New magic types, starting with electricity. Proper chain mechanics, perks, upgrades and visuals.
• The main story developed even further and polished more as well. Deeper main quests, storylines and endings, with commissioned pixel art to go with them.
• Steam Workshop and modding, unless I hit an engineering wall I can't get over, but I will do everything I possibly can to get it into the game as soon as possible, along with dev tools support for modification.

Thank you

I'll be saying this a lot in the coming days, though I want to say it again - thank you to everyone in the community for making this game possible. Particularly the closed beta testers, who have been playtesting tirelessly for many months, and the team of pixel artists on Discord who have contributed the majority of the game's tileset. Roguefort wouldn't be Roguefort without you all, and I'm so grateful to have been able to have this experience with you all. Thanks also to the supporters, who have backed the game and made me believe in it with your contributions as well, including all the folks from the itch.io days who helped me recognise the value in what I was trying to do.

And of course, to my wife and my family, who have been with me all the way at every step, and then some.

It's weird because the journey is just beginning for this game - in many ways, today is the starting point of the "official" adventure. We've come a long way, but there is so much more to come.

Find out more

Roguefort now has an official website: playroguefort.com. It hosts the canonical information for the game, including the FAQ, Press Kit, patch notes, contact details, and soon the wiki too. The FAQ has a bunch of info about Roguefort such as what the roadmap is, how it was made, why it was made, etc.

Come and join us in the Discord - we're coming up to 300 members now, which is exciting. I am very active on there and there's always a lot of discussion, theorising, suggestion-making, and bug reporting going on. Everyone is welcome so please head over if you're interested in the game.

If you're enjoying the game and made it this far, leaving a review on Steam really does help solo devs more than you'd think, even if it's just a line or two.

Thanks for being part of this project.

Tim