Dispatches · FOXFIRE crew
Notes from making FOXFIRE, the survivor-likes we watch while tuning ours, and what's worth tracking in the roguelite space this year. Tagged WORKSHOP for design and build, SIGNAL for peer-game observations, CODEX for canonical game-world entries, DEBRIEF for weekly synthesis, and HORIZON for upcoming releases on our radar.
Siobhan Davis has joined as creative director, we've submitted a Screen Australia application, Stage 3 the Ark Heist has moved from prototype into production and the road to Early Access in H2 2027 is on track.
Two weeks off, 50+ playtest recordings, and one signal louder than the rest: Stage 2 was too hard. Not hard-interesting — hard-unfair. Most of the month went into fixing that.
Three days at Supanova Sydney 2026. What resonated instantly, where players bounced, and the 90+ item improvement list at the end.
Nova Drift is FOXFIRE's closest mechanical peer. A deep comparison of where the designs share DNA and where they diverge — written by the team that gets compared most often.
Five peer survivor-likes and roguelites we go back to as reference points while tuning FOXFIRE — and what each one teaches us about the genre.
Working developers in the survivor-like space publish a watch list of upcoming roguelite bullet heavens for late 2026 through 2027 — including ours.