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[mz-one]

Anyway, that's us obviously being kinda goofy with this one. But we're strong believers that if you want the final game to be fun to play, you need to have some fun while developing it in the first place, so there it is. It's probably also a good idea to have something a bit more lighthearted in contrast to all the other quite depressive stuff that we talk about in most of the other narratives. Well, that was it for today's update! Hope you're all doing well –

Also, talking about the narrative scenarios, what stories would you like to experience in the cyberpunk game of your dreams? We're always brainstorming new ideas, so all input is welcome!

[mz-one]

What's up, spectres! A lot has been happening lately, so it's time for another post to keep you up to speed –

This time I want to talk about navigating your way through the run and about the related mechanics that we finally implemented recently. First, the basics. The essential idea of each network run is that you need to advance through all of the stacks in order to reach the end of the run. When you reach the end of the run, you win the run. On most of these stacks, there are barrier nodes that prevent your daring project od advacing forward, so you have to breach them in order to be able to proceed. Breaching barriers is dangerous, though, in that if you're not smart/strong enough, it might result in the network disconnecting you. If you're disconnected before reaching the end, you lose the run. Illustrated, this is quite simple:



First of our new mechanics, sidestepping, introduces the concept of steering your own way through the network. The basic idea is that there are now three parallel lanes instead of one, and you can sometimes choose to switch to the next lane instead of advancing forward on your current lane. While sidestepping like this doesn't bring you any closer to the end of the run, it provides valuable flexibility in choosing which obstacles do you want to encounter, and also how much rewards you'll be able to collect. You can only sidestep on some stacks and it usually comes with a cost, so you have some decisions to make. Illustrated:



The latest mechanic, scanners, provides you with better information to make those decisions. Remember that while we can see the entire layout of the network in the illustrations above, you can always only see your current stack in the actual game. Now scanners provide at least a limited preview of the stack in front of you, and if the sidestepping option is available, a preview of the stack that you can sidestep to as well. How much information the scanners reveal about the neighbouring stacks depends on the quality of your scanners – with the basic ones, you only get to see the number of their nodes, but with the best scanners you can see the kinds of the nodes and even more subtle details: the strength and traits of the barries, value of the databases etc.

All of these mechanics are rooted in your deck's equipment and your character's Running skill in that with better equipment and skill you receive more sidestepping opportunities, the sidestepping is cheaper, your scanners reveal more information about the stacks around you, and they also reveal it more quickly. There's also quite a lot of random chance involved in this particular mechanic to introduce a bit of chaos into what kind of fragmented views you get to work with.

This is how this looks in motion in the current version:



I'm quite happy with how the mechanics turned out, but I'll be able to say that more confidently how it affects the gameplay at the end of the month, when playtesting the monthly internal release more intensively. In the meantime, take care and stay safe!

[mz-one]

Hi everyone! So Oliver and David, two of our audio trio, moved in together for a week in Brno to be able to focus and record the first six of our ambient tracks in actual, real production quality. From what I hear, they had quite a blast: for the most time they recorded in the studio, but then they even kinda spontaneously went out to play live for a bit in a club, recorded that session and then reprocessed fragments of it into our ambient compositions and so on. Either way, whatever they did worked great as far as we're all concerned; even though the tracks still need to be properly mixed one last time and sort of polished eventually, even in their current shape we collectivelly agreed that we love them very much. Here's a short excerpt for you to listen to:




In other news, recently we've mostly been gearing up for a few major community/promo steps: we're working on our Steam storepage, which we're hopefully just a bit away from opening for wishlisting, we're putting a process in place for first playtesters to play the game, we're almost ready to open our Discord channel, and we're signed up to show the game at the Indie Showcase at the Game Access '22 at Brno in May and then to talk about it on Cybertown in Bratronice, a massive cyberpunk/postapocalyptic roleplaying event here in the Czech Republic in July. In the meantime, Oliver has moved to Athens, where he bought a bunch of children's toys, so that he could take them apart for their funky synthethisers and record you all the best audio effects that he possibly could. In other words, we're doing everything we can to deliver on this.

Talk soon!

[mz-one]

Hi spectres! I'm here today with a major announcement, which is that –

>>> Our Steam storepage is now live! <<<



Although it's still quite early, we decided to open our Steam storefront! For essentially three reasons:

1/ We'll be visiting our first conventions in the near future (more on that soon, also), and it will be useful to have a Steam storepage to direct any people attracted to the game there, so that they have a place to easily wishlist the game and be reminded when it's done.

2/ We decided to use the Steam Playtest to manage the first playtesters, and to use Steam for all the access rights and requests. To be honest, I'm not sure if we had to open our storefront publicly in order to do that, but at least we had to create all the Steam assets anyway, and once we had that, why not open the page to everyone, too.

3/ It's a nice morale boost for us internally as well, to see the storepage publicly on Steam.

What do you think? And once you're there, also wishlist the thing now that you can!

[mz-one]

Hi everyone! How's things with everybody? We have a Discord server now!





Everyone's more than welcome to come hang out: we share news about the development, as well as cyberpunkish stuff in general. We'll be happy to see you there, too!

Speaking of news about the development, we've been spending our time on a few promotional steps in the last few weeks, such as setting up the Steam page, the discord server above, and also most recently livestreaming the game on Vortex, which you can watch here, although it is in Czech only, unfortunately:





For everybody speaking English, though, here's one of the new scenarios that we just finished:




Until next time! Or see you on discord ,)

[mz-one]

We recorded six new music tracks for the network runs and implemented the adaptive mixing that we had prototyped earlier and even had written about in here. Here's one of the new tracks loaded into our tool that allows us to play around with mixing the layers when we're thinking about how to drive the mix algorithmically in-game:





And then here's how the same track works in game. This one is quite straightforward:





1/ We use the 'tunnel' and 'portal' layers as baselines that are playing continuously.

2/ We mix in the 'rotary' layer to make the mix a bit more complex when the mechanical situation during the run is more busy, i.e. there's more nodes or nodes with more mechanics, or there's more protocols, traces, tricks etc.

3/ We drive the 'perc' layer by whether there's currently time-pressure, i.e. either traces, probes on the last stack, or nodes with real-time iterative mechanics.

The result is that the track sounds more intense when there's time-pressure, more complex when there's lot going on mechanically, and fades more into background when the situation is stable, which is all that what we were going for ^.^

The mix script even behaves a bit differently each time that the track starts. For instance, in about one in three cases, we'll use the 'tunnel' and 'rotary' layers as baselines, and mix in the 'portal' layer based on complexity instead of the setup above. We write such logic individually for each track in the game.

I'll also add that this was actually quite a simple track with only four layers, which is the least among the new tracks, which have as much as eight layers to mix. They're all in the game now, in a release-candidate audio quality, so that's another thing that's well on its way. I think that the music that Oliver, David, and Honza make illustrates the mood of our world perfectly, so I'm happy to see it progress so well! Hopefully you're hear it soon, too!