Update: We Got There

Let’s get straight to the point: the demo is ready.

Not almost ready. Just ready.

You could play it, explore and have fun – watch the video below to see it.

But we can’t deliver it to you yet, for a couple of reasons. So, what’s going on?

We want to talk about that and more.

Testing Revelead a Ton

We gathered players to test the demo in front of us. After all this time working on BioSynth, it was an immense satisfaction and joy to see where the game has gotten and how much players appreciated it.

All the players loved the environment and said that it makes you want to go around and discover what’s waiting for you.

Dialogs were also very appreciated.

And the fact that people wanted to keep playing even when the city area is still basically empty (we plan on adding way more cool NPCs and quests) feels great.

There was a player who took part only in 2 minor fights, yet he loved the demo. It means that the world we’re building is fascinating enough to make you don’t care about combats that much.

Fights were working properly, with the exception of some minor bugs that appeared once in while.

The soundtrack and the audio in general felt on point.

And it was very reassuring to know that the game was good also performance-wise: we run it with zero problems on a 6-7 years old pc. We haven’t had the time/resource to really optimize the game, so we weren’t sure how it would perform.

And last but not least, the bugs. Sure, we encountered quite a few bugs, but most of them are easy fixes… we can fix all encountered bugs within a week or so.

Which brings us to the next point.

Translation

One of the reason why we can’t deliver the demo to you yet is that most of the dialogs have been written in Italian. It’s better for the writer to write in his first language and then translate the writing into English, than writing directly in English.

So, at this time, we’re looking for a translator who is an English native speaker and can also speak Italian good enough to understand the dialogs. Finding a good one is harder than it seems, but it’s just a matter of time before we get there.

Apart from that, there’s something more we have to talk about…

Structure Improvements

Since we got to the demo earlier than we were expecting, we saw it as a chance to do something important.

Some of the bugs encountered during the demo could be avoided by having a better code structure as a root for the game.

So, instead of fixing some bugs one by one, we plan on improving the code to fix a bunch of bugs all at once while improving performances, making everything more flexible and having a more robust overall code.

This will also help in adding new features that we didn’t think about when we started to create the game (more on this below).

A Better Experience

Maybe playing Baldur’s Gate 3 ruined me… but at the moment I feel like we could improve combat.

When you start getting skills, fights become a lot more interesting. But at the earliest levels, with no skills or just one, it’s ok but not great. And we’re aiming for greatness.

There are a number of ways to solve this:

• Environmental interactions (if you remember our trailer from a while ago, we already have this… but we were thinking of destructible objects as mid to late game additions. Instead, we now realized that they could feel very refreshing in early game)
• Common actions/skills. For example, think of Baldur’s Gate 3 action shove.
• Class actions/skills outside of those acquired thanks to the skill trees. For example, each bounty hunter could start the game with a set of hand-to-hand combat actions/skills.
• Action/skills acquired by objects (this was already planned for the full game, but we didn’t get to work on it yet… since as an indie developer we don’t have much funding/manpower).
• Certain “combat conditions” that we can’t talk about yet (were already planned for the full game and are really cool… maybe we’ll bring those to the demo).

If we work well, we may be able to add some of these cool things to the demo before we give it to you.

More Content?

This is still an internal debate because we don’t know if we can afford it… but adding more content to the demo would be cool. All will depend on how the works mentioned above will unfold.

If we get the things we talked about ready within a reasonable time and without selling our souls, we’ll likely be able to add a thing or two.

Here’s a list of the possible additional content, in order of priority (highest to lowest):

• 1-2 additional quests
• New class: ninja
• Additional enemy models
• 1-2 additional small indoor levels

Conclusion

To sum it all: we feel like waiting a little more to deliver the demo to you will improve your experience, so you’ll forget us for that 🙂

Anyway, we wanted to talk about what’s ahead for the development of game and show you that BioSynth is slowly but steadily getting where it has to be.

That said, we’re shooting for giving you the demo by the end of September.

Talk soon!

PS: if you want to help us, visit this page and support the game.