We’re running a week late on our July update because our team has been in the middle of the cross-country moves we discussed earlier this year. Everyone is excited to get settled into the new digs and get back up to full speed. The game is looking better by the day, and soon we’ll have these time consuming but necessary hurdles cleared and we will be all hands on deck from here to the alpha in Q4 of this year.
It’s Cory’s moving day, the day the server came down!
July has been busy! Aside from the personal projects of big moves, we’ve made a ton of content across the game. There are so many “irons in the fire” it would be overkill to include them all here. Thankfully, we’re continuing to use and refine the process we’ve used to create 8 games before this, so we know these deep waters -- we’ve swum out more than a few times before.
In engine render, custom scene
Development is continuing at a good pace and we are still set for our Q4 date to release the alpha to the Kickstarter crew. For July’s progress update, we’re going to touch on 3 cool things specifically --
This month, Wounds suddenly grew fangs, claws and got nasty. You can take a Wound by suffering critical hits on the battlefield or getting Downed (reaching 0 HP). If you do drag your injured friend back to the safehouse instead of leaving them, a Wounded merc will need a variable amount of time in a medical clinic -- if the Wound can be healed at all. Those Wounds that can’t be healed have caused such irreparable trauma that only a full cybernetic replacement will suffice. In return, many types of cybernetics will prevent a Wound in the first place -- if a Faulty Heart is rolled on the Wound Tables and that part of you is already chrome, the Wound never takes.
We’ve wrapped up our pre-alpha UI kit that includes all the core interactive elements of the game. It isn’t the final visual style that will be in the game but it is clean and easy to use and is letting us build out the many complicated screens needed to make this game tick!
Another major improvement we’ve made in the last month is to dig back into the story metadata being authored throughout to ensure they help both new and veteran players alike. We’ve now added tagging that identifies dialog choices as positive/accept, negative/deny, delaying options and a neutral color for dialog options that aren’t concluding choices at all, just as conversational or flavor chatter. For new players, this will provide a needed level of clarity and for veteran replayers, this provides speed of play.
In addition, while we added a Skip Dialog option early, we’ve now wired up the metadata to offer a TL;DR button, which skips as much of the entire interaction as possible up to the first required choice.
Get your cyberpunk fix on our social accounts!
In addition to our @TreseBrothers twitter where we chat game dev and share highlights from all our games, you can get specific Cyber Knights updates and sneak peaks on its Facebook and twitter account.
Plug in to keep updated and get your regular cyberpunk fix. We’re sharing concept art, gameplay previews, news & interviews, highlights from the forums & discord, shout-outs to other awesome cyberpunk creators, and more. See you on the net, Knight!
Executive Producers #8
We’ve got the 8th Executive Producers meeting scheduled now on the books for mid August. From now until the alpha release, we are working to schedule monthly meetings with the Executive Producers. It’s a great team and we want to keep them close to the ongoing development to facilitate detailed feedback on our design decisions. We will include an excerpt of the meeting in the next Kickstarter update.
Reward and Stretch Goal Progress
With each update, we always include the progress bar infographic. If you have any questions about rewards or stretch goals, check out the graphic or reach out to us. With this update, there are no changes to the progress bar as we are getting down to only a few final milestones before the next big thing -- alpha late this year.
Still blaming the beards!
We are still delivering 3D faces, and have now delivered more than 70% of them. Thank you for your patience on these, they are coming.
