Hey Everyone!

It's been a bit of a strange month, hence the slight delay with this Dev Diary. Almost exactly a year ago we had a major disaster. The place where we developed the game as a very small team caught fire one night and we lost everything. When we say everything we mean everything. Luckily we had all our data backed up to the cloud using Backblaze but literally everything physical we owned ended up sadly as a pile of ashes. Obviously this wasn't the best thing that could have happened to us after a year of solid game development and it did set us back a few months while we obtained somewhere new to work, deal with all the insurance and then download nearly 6Tb of data before the game dev could commence again.

The reason I'm mentioning this is because three weeks ago we finally got back home to our original premises and began the pain in the ass task of setting up our little studio again with our preferred workflow back in place and finally crack on with making the game we started over eighteen months ago. We have managed to work on the game separately in our temporary residences in this time (which brings its own difficulties) but to be back home again should really accelerate the dev process.

Anyway, moving forward we released the "Final" demo a short while back which we thought would be the final version before we start on the game builds but we had so many people reach out to us and say that game desperately needs a map/compass system so the player isn't just aimlessly wondering the map hoping to stumble onto the next mission location that we knew we had to add this before we go any further. We did originally plan on having no map as we wanted the player to experience having to find new locations through exploration and discovery in the same way that the early Elder Scrolls games did and your only help would be from NPC's giving vague directions or street markings and road signs but it seems times sadly move on and people want mission markers and so we had to accommodate this.

Implementing the mini-map and compass system should have been a quick task. Other than having to draw the map as one large 4K texture and making sure every building lined up correctly as well as having the correct scaling implemented which took a bit of time the actual integration should have been pretty easy. WRONG. Five days, yes five days we spent changing the character controller, character blueprint as well as the level blueprint and it wasn't until we added a simple 0.2 second delay node that it finally worked. I think we spent less time building the basic level design than we did adding this mini-map. This is the funny thing about game dev. Sometimes you can build large sprawling worlds pretty quickly then by adding one small detail it could take almost as much time. So weird.

So where are we now?. The "Final" demo will be uploaded and available within the next few days and the first ever game build should be up not too long after that and hopefully on Steam too. We obviously have to add the mission markers and connect them to the mission systems then we are keen to add more missions, more XXX animations, more characters, more weapons and more locations. All of these things will be coming over the next few months with each subsequent game build release. These will only be available to Patreon supporters who are VIP and above.

As usual, we would love any feedback through our usual channels on Discord so get over there if you aren't already and let us know where we are going right and where we are going wrong. All input is greatly appreciated.

The Cyberpunk Crew