Update: Good Stuff :)

Recently we haven’t shared much publicly, but this doesn’t mean we were chilling on a tropical island… on the contrary, we were working behind the scenes.

Let’s talk about what’s been going on.

New Functionalities… and Bugs

Do you remember the tool we’ve been building to handle conversation? If you don’t, you can read about it here.

Well, before going on with the game development, we took the time to add some functionalities to it… some of which could make us better surprise you during the game. For example, you may approach an ostile-looking NPC expecting him to be alone… 4 VS 1 is a pretty easy fight, isn’t it? It’s a shame that once you talk with the NPC, he calls some friends who were hiding and now you have to fight 4 VS 7. This is one of the cool things that are doable with the dialogue tool we made.

Once we completed the new functionalities, we wanted to test the tool by placing a complex conversation into it… and that’s were an endless cycle of pain began.

We already used the tool to place some simple conversations into the game and it worked perfectly. All the bugs arose when working with a complex dialogue.

Fixing all those bugs took us a very long time…

… but in the end we did it. We fixed all the bugs that prevented us to use the tool as we wanted.

Do you know what? The hard work was very well worth it! Thanks to the dialogue maker, we can currently place a relatively complex dialogue inside the game in just a few hours. It’s fast! And it’s a great tool to improve dialogues.

Here’s an example of the type of branched dialogues that this tool allows us to build.

This leads us to the next point.

Dialogues, dialogues, dialogues

At this very moment, if we look at all the dialogues in the game, there are 10.827 words. That’s about 1/4 of a novel, which probably is pretty good for a demo 🙂

Also, let me say that such count will likely increase before we’ll deliver the demo to you.

But it isn’t all about the quantity… in fact, our priority in dialogs is the quality of the writing.

Let’s talk about the example shown in the image above.

• Some of the dialogue lines won’t appear right away – you’ll need to unleash certain events to see some options.
• Some dialogue lines will impact your reputation – thus influencing how other NPCs respond to you.
• Some of those lines are completely optional and shows you a bit of the lore.
• Etc…

Sure, that dialogue isn’t perfect (and we want to keep improving it), but it’s a step in the right direction.

Here’s a good news: we already placed ALL the dialogues for the demo inside the game – even though we’re still working on them to keep improving. It means that we’re very close to releasing the internal demo for testing 🙂 Like VERY close.

Reworking the Environment

After careful thoughts, we decided to rework the environment of the district of the city that you’ll visit at first during the game.

It was a tough decision, but the district look wasn’t 100% fulfilling our standards.

It’s some extra-work and it will take some extra-time, but we want to deliver the best quality that we can. And this is on the way of accomplishing that. We hope you’ll understand us.

We can’t show anything yet… but it’s going to be more cyberpunk than you saw on the Kickstarter trailer.

New Characters

We’re considering the introduction of a high status character inside the demo. He’s very powerful and cool… think of it like meeting Drizzt Do’Urden in Baldur’s Gate 1.

In case you’re wondering: yes, if you want, you’ll be able to fight him… but he’ll just destroy you while in the demo – it’s a fight for high levels, so in the final game you are free to come back and face him… and loot an amazing unique item if you get to win.

We think this is a cool way to show you the world building behind BioSynth and let you get a glance at what type of content will be in the final game.

So… are we going to show you the concept art for this character?

No 🙂

Maybe in the future.

On the other hand, we have another character’s concept art to share with you so that you’ll forgive us.

Ok, that’s it for today. We’ll likely share another interesting update very soon, so don’t forget to check us in next week(s).

Talk soon!