Hi everyone!
It's been a while since we posted anything here. But that's because we've been working hard (and also playing a lot of Cyberpunk... :P) on the most complex and ambitious system for the game - Interactive Events. Today I wanted to show you the progress made throughout Christmas and the first weeks of 2021. If you want to up-to-date with everything that is going on with DevLife we encourage you to join our Discord server as I post there stuff way before then here on Steam.
On the screenshot above you can see the first version of the UI for the events. It contains the graphic for the event, its description, and available choices. On the surface, it looks very simple, but there is a lot of logic behind it as some options are only available under certain conditions and your choices must have an actual impact on the gameplay.
To complicate things even more I had to make an editor that would allow for easy creating and tracking of branches in each event. The best way of doing it was to make a graph with nodes that have different functionality. I've never done anything similar to this so it was a great learning process for me. I decided to use xNode, as a framework for handling the drawing of the editor. This has greatly facilitated the whole process.
If you would like to see how this system and editor for it came to life, you can check out live streams that I've done on my personal YouTube channel.
The system is now in the fine-tuning phase and most functions are implemented and working. Now comes the tricky part of creating the events themselves. For the first update with this feature, we plan to convert applicable game mechanics (for example: bankruptcy, changing employees' salaries, etc.) to work as Interactive Events. Then in the next months, we will be adding theme-based events that will focus mostly on one subject (for example: pets, family, etc.).
It's a lot of work to predict all possible combinations of traits and other factors and because of that, we are targeting the Q1 of 2021 as the time of release for this update. But even that is subject to change and as we don't want to make CD Projekt's mistake and release an unfinished product. So it will come to the game when it's ready :D
That's all for now!
Have a great day.
Roman