Hi. This update feels small because there are no new Cores.
I'm spending most of my design time in Depth-3, which isn't ready to show even in the _dev branch. Designing Depth-3 doesn't go as smoothly as I would've liked, but we are getting there (or at least somewhere).
Skins
Alex and Andrew compiled a basic skin selection window. Nothing is locked there for now, so go play as a fox while you can.
Having different looking avatars will make some people think that they should also be tied to an ability or have some other kind of gameplay effect. I get this. We should at least try to do this for challenges.
For the base gameplay, though, I've already tried characters with different starting setups at the very beginning of the project. Here's a character selection UI in the prototype (which is still up on itch, btw if you are curious).
The idea of characters was eventually discarded for various subjective reasons. It worked to some degree, but I much prefer the game being "flat", with players discovering peaks on their own, rather than me pushing them there.
NET.CRAWL structurally is too tight of a game to make Brotato-style characters work. And I couldn't possibly make StS-style characters, neither I wanted to at any point.
What I'm trying to say in this awkward tangent is that I understand (I think I do) your comments about "starting characters". I lowkey wish that worked for the game. I tried it, and it didn't. Of course, it's very subjective, but that's where we are.
Anyway, if you have any comments about skins, please share them. Alex doesn't seem to be too hyped about drawing skins, and I usually care very little about cosmetics in games, so external motivation might go a long way here.
Run History
Next to the skin selection there's a new Run History screen.
As you can see, I'm very good at the game. Just kidding, I was testing (although the last loss is legit).
Speaking of testing, this is a meme I made late at night after a very long day:
Remote Controller has been disabled for more than a year due to too many side effects. Since then the game has gotten a lot cleaner, but there are still some unintended interactions left. In particular, you can infinitely "remote control" two Remote Controllers into each other. I don't know why anyone would do that, but technically it's possible. There might be less benign interactions left.
But it seems to work fine with Navi, which is already something.
Voice Mail was reworked into a "Callbacks Extractor" with Remote:
And its "2 Data, 1 Callback" effect was moved to E-Book.
It's good for the project to have more Callback generation. Voice Mail got thematically stronger from this, and now makes a better pair with E-mail.
Designing Bitflip was tricky. It was obvious what it should do, but it was very unclear how to fit it in between Laser Pointer (Express, exhaust target) and the 1 Action mass refresh nodes (Fire Extinguisher and Cloud Backup).
I hope this variant works. And if it doesn't, and it will lead to too many broken infinites - so be it.
edit: here I forgot to mention that Bitflip+ has Multiuse(2), so the 2nd use is almost always free, and with something like Hyperlink both uses might be, which is definitely is going to break the game.
Speaking of infinite-enablers here's one:
Alert is a new keyword that simply reads: "Add 2 Trace and strengthen Firewall by 2". It allowed to make wordings on Polaris and Loki lighter. Maybe, it should say Alarm and not Alert. It's hard for me to tell as a non-native speaker.
There are a couple more nodes that don't have final artwork yet. Immortal Snail is one of them. It turned out really good. I really love it, which means I often hate it. It's a complicated emotion. The exact kind of emotion you want to get from a hostile node.
Few final thoughts
That's it for today. Full patch notes are somewhere below. A few thoughts before I go.
We are floating the idea of going for 1.0 release as part of the Steam Cyberpunk Festival on August 3rd. That's a lot sooner than I would've wanted, but it should help us some with getting visibility on Steam, so we at least have to try. That would imply that some planned features will be pushed to post-release updates. Realistically, it's nothing but labels at this point. Our approach changed very little after the EA release. A feature is a feature, and it shouldn't matter if it's part of Early Access or a post-release update. The only important thing is if it was made at all. And more visibility will only increase our chances of getting "luxury" features done. (btw, reminder that the roadmap is here, but I don't want to update it until we'll clear up the situation with the Release)
The other thing that I wanted to mention is that Michael Brough is back with https://store.steampowered.com/app/3304110/868BACK/
It's a very strange recommendation to give, because you either already know Michael's work and are hyped about this, or it will be confusing. For lack of a better alternative, it's like recommending Shostakovich to someone you met at a party where chill music was playing. Okay, I don't want to pretend that NET.CRAWL is a chill game which doesn't require effort, but 868-BACK is just on another level in terms of weirdness and obscurity. And it's actually a good game with the potential to activate parts of your brain that you didn't know existed. If you somehow don't know what a Broughlike is, then you should at least investigate the genre a little bit.
Thanks for reading.