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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!

[mz-one]

Hi netspectres! We're back with another update, today with two different pieces of news to share –

Firstly, for the last few months we've been cooperating with Josef Surý (website), who started to paint first of the illustrations that we'll use to accompany the narratives. We decided together to start with a few ambient views of the city in order to figure out the general vibe, and here's first of those finished –



What do you think?

For the second topic today, we went to GameAccess in Brno, a Czech game developer expo which features a great Indie Showcase section where people can present their indie games in development. Me and Ondra set up a booth and had people coming over to play our current build for two days straight. This was the first time that we presented the game publicly like this and I think that the feedback that we got was great. People were interested in the concept and we had someone at the booth most of the time. In the end, I think that we had perhaps thirty people playing the game, maybe more? About half of the people opted to play the game hands-on, and we played through the game ourselves for the other ones. Either way, people were picking up on the concept pretty quickly, which I think is great news. Of course we got a lot of feedback for what to improve, but mostly it was about stuff that we already plan to change, so nothing that would warrant a huge course-correction. This is us:





Btw, our discord is starting to liven up and I'll be posting updates like these there more often, so do come over if you'd like to stay in touch! Discord >>>

And also a reminder that you can now wishlist us on Steam >>>

Until next time!

[mz-one]

Hi everyone!

Just a quick update:

We've revising our mechanic descriptions, so that they all use consistent language and UI, which was quite a major change, but seems to be done now. We plan to overhaul the visual aspect of the UX soon, so we wanted to prepare and be clear about what text we need to show for everything, so that's now mostly done:





You can notice another aspect that we're introducing with this revision: the alternative, verbose explications of all of the mechanics. These are our answer to the classic problem: it's more elegant to reference the most common mechanics only with their keyword ('Generate 2'), but it's also important to explain that keyword conveniently ('Creates two tokens'), so that you can learn what it means in the first place, or refresh your memory if you're coming back to the game after some time, for example. Our solution is that whenever you're seeing any compact description label, you can hold down [alt] to see a more verbose version of what that description means in its place instead. Internally, we quite like the UX feel of that approach so far, so we're curious what our playtesters will say when we push this out with the next update.

Besides that, we're gearing up towards our UI revision, writing new scenarios, and designing the metagame, i.e. unlocking new features and difficulties as you manage to win so that the game keeps being fresh and challenging for some time. Right now we're stabilising a new build for our internal playtesters with all of the changes from the last several weeks. If you're interested in joining, just hop on our discord, where everyone's most welcome.

Let's talk again soon! We have a few more new illustrations almost finished, so hopefully we'll be able to share those next time. They're shaping up quite nicely ^.^

[mz-one]

Hi spectres! What's good?

A lot has been happening on our end; for starters, check out one of the new illustrations for the narrative scenarios, courtesy of our own Josef Surý:



The picture shows Ravenscourt, a tightly-packed, busy district with middle-class business and residential properties, a labyrinth of buildings constructed atop each other, almost preventing the natural light from coming through at all. The illustration itself will serve as a common, ambient backdrop for various ministories that can spawn randomly inbetween the freelancing spectre contracts.

We're focusing on the visual aspect of things for a few months, from the illustrations such as the one above, to our procedurally-generated network element visuals. Here's our improved VFX editor with an early template for how the network security barriers should look. Even if nothing else, it's amazing fun to play around with this and just explore what it can do; we've got so many ideas how to make this looks awesome:





We also released a new version for our playtesters, with quite a major rebalancing of our network elements and also fixes for the inconveniences that our playtesters mentioned the most often, i.e. the glitching autosaving and also the adaptive music sometimes generating an unintended noise, which turned out to be an interesting issue with the music mixing algorithm. Both of these are now confirmed by the playtesters to have been fixed, so we can move forward to the more fun stuff.

I haven't updated here in a while, but if you're interested in staying in the loop, connect with us on Twitter or Discord, where we provide smaller updates more frequently. You can also wishlist Netspectre on Steam, which we're always happy to see happen! It really keeps us going seeing that people are interested –

Until next time!

[mz-one]

Greetings from the cyberfuture once again!

Things are very much going forward on our end, so I wanted to update you with the latest goings-on –

Game Developer Session 2022
Inspired by the good times that we had at GameAccess in Brno in May, we participated in another gamedev conference, this time the Game Developers Session in Prague. We had a small booth in the Indie Expo section with a PC with the latest build, where over the course of the two days more than thirty people stopped by and played for about thirty minutes each, providing us with great feedback. Overall, the response was super positive; we were kind of nervous about the still primitive visuals of the game, but everyone was graciously able to see past them for the time being and to just enjoy the gameplay and narratives, which they seemed to like quite a lot.

A few pictures from the thing –


Our booth ^.^


The braver people played the game by themselves; about a half of our visitors did and they usually picked it up surprisingly easily –


The crew, yours truly

In addition to playing right there at the venue, we had more then thirty Steam keys to give away on cards that we had printed for the occasion and which we had run out of by the end of the second day. Fantastically, Steam is telling us that quite a few people actually played the game at their leisure over the following week, some of them even for more than several hours, which I feel is an amazing sign! The thing is obviously actually getting pretty playable, which is cool –

Illustrations
We're working on more illustrations to accompany the narrative events – here's a look at Arcades, the shopping megadistrict of our city, a massive manifestation of the consumer commerce that's keeping the veins of economy pulsing:


We made this one essentially just because we wanted to, with no particular narrative written beforehand; now looking at it, it's inspiring us to write stuff retrospectively, so we created this one a bit the other way around than usually –

Final stack operations
We're also reworking our mechanics for the final stack: instead of just having to breach all the barriers exactly like in all of the stacks leading up to it, the last stack of each run now features a special operation node, representing the opportunity to execute the particular move that you are penetrating the network for. Through a sequence of two to three steps for each operation node – and in higher-level networks even through resolving several of these nodes in succession – you'll be able to feel more like you're actually delivering on the contract's objectives, e.g. downloading a particularly named data package, sabotaging the network, manipulating particular data that you were contracted to change or delete etc.; here's a sneaky-peaky –





Misc
We also sketched out the basic visuals for all of the blueprint barriers in the game; made the alerts caused under trace to reduce the traces' countdown linearly over-time instead of immediately in one instant step; composed and added new music tracks; started to procedurally generate each network's name just to give a bit more flavor; started to work on the final UI for the first screen, and so on –

//

All in all, we're firing on all cylinders! We also organised a weekend getaway for the team to hang out together on a cottage in two weeks time, where we'll be intensively playing the game and coming up with new ideas to make this all as cool as we possibly can for you, so that you may enjoy it as much as we'd love you to when it finally comes out. In the meanwhile, hope you all are doing great –

[mz-one]

Hi everybody!

A quick update about what's happening –

Workshop
Last weekend, we went to a countryside cottage for the entire weekend together, so that we could focus on the game while at the same place at the same time. It was great fun and we actually got a lot of work done: we heavily playtested the latest build and balanced the difficulty, came up with dozens of new ideas, and fixed a lot of issues. We also reworked two of our music tracks and created a few new sound effects. It was great that we could iterate on things so quickly: if we wanted to try something, we just went ahead and did it and immediately got to see and discuss whether it works. We'll definitely do this more often, not least because the place itself is beautiful, situated within a really serene landscape; an absolute opposite of a place you'd expect for making a dystopian cyberpunk hacking game. A few pictures –


Playtesting –


Oliver working on the new music –


Outside at night –

Czech/Slovak Games Week
We've been invited to participate in the Czech & Slovak Games Week, a promo week for videogames made in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Here's our slot with a short introduction of Netspectre in the event's opening stream:

https://youtu.be/8tPTVEJybFU?t=2677

The event is still running until tomorrow, receiving some support from Steam, helping all of the participating games to get some attention, so check it out for all of the other cool games done here in our country and friends: Cz/Sk Games Week / Steam

Moods
Here's a random video that we did while experimenting with procedural ambient backgrounds for the new UI that we're working on. To be functional as a background, it will obviously need to be much more subdued, but I feel like it's fun to watch as it is anyway, just to get kind of a feeling for the emotions that we're going for:





All in all, things are moving forward as fast as we can make them! I'll keep you posted. If you'd like to stay in touch and make our day, come wishlist Netspectre on Steam –

Until next time!

[mz-one]

Hi everyone! We're here with another update about what's going on. We set our three main priorities for the new year:

1/ Final UI
2/ Tutorials and the overall new player experience
3/ Finishing the narrative mechanics

– and we started right away with the first one. The first screen that we started to make the proper UI for is the launch screen, i.e. the screen through which you launch a new game. That's actually several screens in sequence: in the first one you choose your ambition, which determines the main storyline, and in the second one you create your hacker character, and more steps unlock as you progress through the game. Here's how the screens looks like at the moment:





What do you think? You can see that on the character screen, the most important choice is distributing your skill points, which you can spend on Running, Tinkering, and Networking. All three are mostly implemented and affect the gameplay in quite important ways, but that's another topic for another time.

We're also working on new illustrations. Lately, we worked on Fractal, the club at which you set up your meetings in many of the narrative scenarios. This is the first artwork that we commissioned from the supertalented Lukáš Havlík and we're excited about the result:


A holographic art gallery, a musical venue, and a bar all-in-one, Fractal is the cool place to be, and also where you meet a lot of your contractors.

We're also working on another Fractal illustration, for which we want to develop a system that will allow us to make variations to illustration, i.e. making it look a bit different every time that we use it. I think it should look great, so I'm looking forward to working on it right now and sharing the results when we have them.

At the same time, we're pushing ahead on all the other fronts, especially writing new scenarios and composing new music. Let's talk about these some other time. In the meantime, take care and talk soon!

[mz-one]

Hey everbody! A lot has been happening on our end, so here's at least some progress to share:

We wanted to provide a bit more life to the narrative illustrations, so we started to develop some of them in two different versions and then we randomly swap elements from one into the other to create more variety. We do that instantly when we start to show the illustration, and then we do it through animated transitions while the illustration is already being displayed. The idea is that while you look at this e.g. club, new people will appear in the scene or disappear from it, or the signs might change what they're showing and so on, just like it'd happen in a real club. Take a look –





In keeping with our priorities of developing the new UI, here's wip of our new world screen. Right now we're working on the contract section, where you get to pick your next freelancing contract. The idea is that you can switch between an overview, where you see the most important properties of each contract, and a detailed view, where you can see all the details about a particular contract before you decide to connect to its associated network coordinates. Here's how it looks in today's freshest build:





We're gearing up for Game Access '23 in Brno, where we'll be available as part of the Indie Expo for everyone to play our latest version, so we're working hard to have the best version of Netspectre there that we can! In running up to that, we'll drive up to a cottage over the previous weekend to have a team workshop and play the game together extensively to tweak everything before we present the demo to the players at the conference.

Talk again soon!

[mz-one]

I just wanted to drive by here to say that we're steadily moving forward!

The most important progress that we've made is on the UI front. We completely reworked the layout for the two most important screens, i.e. the world screen and the deck screen, so that everything is grouped more conveniently, e.g. you can see your current deck right next to the market with the new components and so on. Here's a quick look at the current version:





There's many other important changes that we made along with the new UI, most importantly a complete revision of the optimisation mechanic. You can now work towards specific component upgrades instead of waiting for a random one to happen. Your Tinkering skill drives how effective you are in working towards these. The assets sometimes appear already optimised on the market, for a higher price, and conversely, if you're selling back a component or a module that you've optimised, you get a better price, too:





We also made large progress on the soundtrack, being close to finalising the music completely. I want to talk about that soon, too. In the meantime, we're hoping you have a great day, and if you have any thoughts about what you'd like to see in a cyberpunk hacking roguelike, do let us know while there's still time ^.^

[mz-one]

Hi everybody!

A quick update: we're working mostly on the new UX, finally being done with the first two screens through which you can launch a new playline –





On the second screen, you can see that you're distributing skill points between three skills before launching the playline: Running, Tinkering, and Networking. We've also redesigned their mechanical benefits, adding different advantages to each, until we now feel confident that all three are interestingly balanced. At least when we're starting a new playline now, we kind of want to take all three of them, which I think is a good sign that a/ they're all attractive and b/ distributing the skill points between them is a meaningful decision, which are the two obvious goals that we were aiming for with the design.

Now we're focusing mostly on designing a slick look for the run screen. Here's one of the concept from along the way, for the traces, authorisation/token module, and the weaknesses, respectively:



It's also worth noting that for all of the visual design that you're seeing above, we're collaborating with the amazingly talented Lukas Havlik, so if you like what you're seeing, follow the link to find out much more of that Lukas is doing: it's all really, really great stuff.

On the audio front, we're mostly done with all of our music, so we're now shifting focus to working on the sound effects. As the UI of at least few screens is maturing towards its final form, we now have a more solid idea of where we're heading aesthetically, and we're using that as an inspiration to work on the sounds to complement the visuals. We'll certainly share more in one of the future posts, but for now, it's time to go back to work on all of this, so that you can actually play it soon enough instead of just reading about it all the time on the forums ^.^

Talk soon!

[mz-one]

Hey everyone!

A lot has been happening:

Music

First of all, we've finished all of our music. It was so much fun that we ended up with even more stuff than we originally planned, so now we have 18 ambient tracks and 12 hacking tracks. That means 100+ minutes just of the ambient music and then the infinite combinations of how the hacking tracks adapt to the particular gameplay. I think that the music turned out really great and we can't wait for you to hear it soon, too ^.^

Tutorials

We made some of the tutorials and other onboarding tricks and started playtesting with people who we let play Netspectre for the first time and see how they do completely without our guidance. For the most part, it's been encouraging to see them pick up everything pretty smoothly, so that's great news. There's still a lot to do and we'd like to have most of it done for GameAccess in the end of May, so that we can playtest with people that will stop by our booth there, too*. Here's a video illustrating where we're at –




*) (Which can be you, too, if you're nearby! GameAccess is awesome and we definitely recommend it.)

Audio workshop

As we like to do, we met up for a weekend in the countryside to work intensively on the audio. We did a lot of exploratory work remotely beforehand, but ultimately it's always more fun to spend the time together in the same room and iterate that much more quickly. And we did produce some great sounds! Here's how it looked like, and as for the sounds themselves, we're just now cleaning everything up and integrating it into our playtesters' build on Steam. We're continuously inviting new playtesters, so if you'd like to participate, too, let us know, here or on discord.





Talk again soon!