Morning, guys!
It's been rat-racing for months and we haven't a day off since our last update. There are dozens of challenges and emergencies that we faced, and they’ve all been sorted out. I’ll share them with you as I did in our closed (backers only) report for our successfully completed project "The Fall of Gyes." Yet, even now I can say that we faced the theme’s core challenges: the human factor, and of course money (in keeping the quality of our indie development on AAA level).
Similarly to our TFoG project, I more than doubled our collected funds from personal investments so we can keep the RPG dream alive and at the high level of quality we want. Likewise, as it was for the first project, it‘s the fans who encouraged me to make such a dedicated decision. The support you’ve shown us on Steam Early Access even in our current stage of development made this an easy choice. We can’t believe in the project less than our fans, right?
Right before the release of this patch I found our archives of various builds of the game showing how the game would look like without your support. We'll share them in the next update.
AiCola asked the relevant question on our Steam forum: "How much % of the prologue work is done?"
I bet, everybody is concerned about it too. Well, about 87% of the prologue is done. We’re at 95% completion for the programming side of things, and we have all models, dialogues, most of the voicing, audio, items, full gameplay, and full mechanics completed. We're back to assembling all that through programming right after posting this update.
For now, here’s a detailed list of what we’ve accomplished.
PATCH #091215 RELEASED!
The Patch Notes is too huge for the announcement so you can read and post about any issues you'll meet on that page: http://steamcommunity.com/app/335850/discussions/0/517141882709798176/
HARD SCI-FI CONTEST FOOTING
In a previous update we announced a small, hard-sci-fi contest about "Force Field" technology: http://www.afterreset.com/forum/showthread.php?t=328
The results and winners announcement you can read in the full news on our web site: http://www.afterreset.com/forum/showthread.php?t=400
IN-GAME CREATURES IDENTIFICATION
In your adventures through the After Reset world you will constantly be coming across different creatures. Each of them has a description that will be very familiar to all fans of old school RPGs. Read more about this feature we're presenting in the full news on our web site: http://www.afterreset.com/forum/showthread.php?t=400
CREATURE, FLESH WORMS
Speaking of the creatures, I’d like to present one of the hostiles you’ll meet playing with in the prologue. While programmers work their magic on the GUI, we don't just wander around the office. We continue to populate the Gyes Bunker with its new dwellers. This little one is 15-20 inches in length, and it is the most harmless thing on the base. Find more about them on our web site as well: http://www.afterreset.com/forum/showthread.php?t=400
PERSONAL APPEARANCE AND ALIGNMENT FEATURE
In previous updates I introduced our first "Personal Appearance Feature" to backer Jake Ganor. I'm glad to present his model embedded in this playable game build. Much obliged for your support and trust, man.
Naturally, it’s not an accident that I’m presenting his appearance in this update. The reason is that the new Alignment system affects character appearance, which you choose at character creation. Your character will now have more personality and unique, emotional facial appearances based on the alignment, achievements, and mood at the time. This required a hell of a lot of work, and we’re super excited to unveil it.
The reason we decided to embed this complex but cool feature is so that you can establish a deep bond with your character, and give them (and the NPCs we create) a lot of character personality. Beyond that, there will be quite many dialogues (100+ pages are done for the prologue only) and staring at the static face of the character and NPCs would get old fast. That’s not the AAA standard we’re going for, and we think the time was well spent.
The reason we decided to embed this complex but cool feature is so that you can establish a deep bond with your character, and give them (and the NPCs we create) a lot of character personality. Beyond that, there will be quite many dialogues (100+ pages are done for the prologue only) and staring at the static face of the character and NPCs would get old fast. That’s not the AAA standard we’re going for, and we think the time was well spent.
PROLOGUE'S DIALOGS ARE WRITTEN
I’ve completed the dialogue writing for the full prologue. It is about 100+ pages of A4. I must say that although I worked out variants for the language filter, we’re embedding only realistic, rough language by default in the current build, and the filtered version will be available at a later date.
Why so many texts? Well, it’s not only because I frequently DM in role-play. :) It’s also because of one cool feature we’re been secretly working on: NPC AI personality. We don’t know what personal features will be chosen by a NPC in a given play through. Thus, the dialogues are not lined by sequences, but by personality types taken by the NPC at random. This is to say that their response to a prompt might differ in a specific play through based on factors outside your control. Anyway, we’ll talk about this more during our campaign to complete Chapter 1.
For now I’d just like to say that we wrote, recorded, and post-processed all dialogues for Ivy. You can check a couple of her lines made by Trina here:
http://www.afterreset.com/ARMEDIA/NEWS/091215/Ivy.wav
And right before the release I got all records from Chris who is the official voice of the Quanton Hub at Gyes bunker:
http://www.afterreset.com/ARMEDIA/NEWS/091215/Quanton.wav
Well, if you like to read more about the features above, read new lore, see new items, etc., - just follow the white rabbit... oh, I mean - follow the link on the news thread on our web site: http://www.afterreset.com/news
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Once again, thank you for your support and participation!
Your support is the ground that After Reset is built on! I mean it!
Back to work, and see you soon!
Sincerely,
Richard.