Update: Bad News and Good News

Are you ready for some news about BioSynth: Rising?

We got bad news and good news.

Let’s start with the bad news: we decided to delay the demo 0.1 (the demo that we would play inside our team to test things) a little bit to take care of some development aspects.

We already have everything to complete the demo 0.1: the dialogues are written, the quests are ready to be placed into the engine, all the features work and all the assets are completed.

Then, why are we delaying the demo 0.1?

In the last post we showed the dialogue for an NPC involved in a simple side quest. It seems quite complex, doesn’t it?

Well, when we consider an NPC involved in a quest that can be solved in many ways and by siding with different factions, things get a lot more complex.

With our current setup we can totally bring such a quest inside the game engine. But it’s more time consuming that we would like and there are chances for human mistakes. Sure, we can totally complete a demo… but this system would be a total mess for the final game. And our end goal is to deliver the best game we can – not just a good demo followed by a broken game.

That’s why we decided to create a better system before bringing all the quests inside the engine.

So let’s start with the good news 🙂

We’re creating something similar to the softwares that Obisidian and Larian used for their dialogues.

Once such software is ready, we’d have a series of big benefits:

• No human mistakes when assigning a dialogue to a NPC – everything would be fully automated.
• The ability to write dialogues right inside the game engine – which means that we can add actions and requirement(s) right away.
• Better dialogues! Since we immediately see every answer to a certain node, we have an easy way to notice when a specific dialog piece is missing depth.
• Better dialogues part 2! We have the ability to easily count the requirements used in a single dialogue or in all of them… so, if we notice that a specific requirement is not appearing enough times, we can add dialogue pieces to adjust the thing.
• A practical tool for localization and the eventual voice acting.

Now you’re probably wondering: what’s the current progress for this work?

We aren’t that far from completing it. Most of the core functions are already built and many of them are already integrated to work together. We can confidently say that we crossed the 50% mark.

The good news is that once this dialog software is ready, we’ll be able to place all the quests and dialogues that we currently have in just a few days 🙂

This basically means that we’ll get back the time that we invested into the dialog software – so, at the end, while this caused a retard in the demo 0.1, it won’t cause a significant delay in the demo 1.0 – at most it will be just a small delay.

Let’s update soon!