Hello everyone!
It's been some time since the last update on SourceWorld, but we've come back in full force since the last demo, the first demo we released as most know was in August 2024 and we've received a lot of feedback, whenever it be players or content creators, whenever the map generator itself was a bit stiff at the time, or had barely anything to offer, or the city being too bland and empty, we're still working on most, but almost a year later since then, we heard you, we answered, so here's the 2025's Sourceworld demo for Steam Next Fest for June.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3654230/
There's been many changes since last article from about 3 months ago. During all this time, we've been working really hard to push the Demo today. There's so many changes and small additions that we can't fit them all in this single article. However, we can still just show you some proof of our work.
Inventory changes | Equipment
Inventory has received some visual tweaks like 3D item preview and key hints. Aside from that, to replace vanilla HL2 armor, we added equipment items which currently provide damage resists.
Healing works slightly differently too. You can now assign usable items to limited amount of Quick Slots, in which you can use items without opening inventory. Player's now have to rely more on their inventory mid-combat.
Weapons Overhaul
SourceWorld's weapons system works in tandem with inventory. Instead of being locked to predefined weapon slots, players are able to assign any weapon to any of their available 6 slots. You're also able to carry multiple instances of same weapon.
For example, you can carry 2 pistols and upon certain conditions you may as well dual wield.
Trader Interface
Updated maps
Training Level
Added specifically to teach players how inventory and weapon systems work.
Kriss Vector
The single new weapon we bringing you in today's release is Kriss Vector - something we've been wanting to add since long time ago. Fires rapidly and has minimum recoil.
Textures by The_Guardian™. Modelled by yours truly.
Auto-Saving
Limiting players to saving only at certain places is very harsh considering the unpredictable nature of the game. You're now able to choose to load from last checkpoint. Checkpoints are triggered by any map transitions, so players are now able to continue from the moment they entered the generated world or the moment they returned back to the lab, in case they died during events.
Overall, this should drastically lower the amount of progress and time lost with every death. Don't see this as oversimplifying the difficulty, as we're not intending to make the game into a hardcore Roguelike. Besides, it's better to make things a little too easy, than overly difficult.
Conclusion
Of course some of game's mechanics were heavily requested to be improved, and some still require work, so bugs and glitches are still a possibility with the number of features this 2025 demo comes with, and still many to approach and implement with, most likely being the current limited number of enemies and tilesets which the demo still suffers from, Half-Life 1 enemies would be a good start to begin with in the future.
Now some may still ask whenever SourceWorld has a full release date in the future - This remains uncertain unfortunately as Bronco Development is a 2 men project + people contributing to the project in their own fair share for free (Whenever it be voices, assets, coding, etc.) and so we're doing this on our own free time too, although in our hopes a full release could be somewhere in 2026, this plan can change any time.
It's saddening for us to not have much new content in the modification compared to previous demo. All these months we were focused on overhauling things that already existed. Map generator was completely rewritten from scratch. Inventory and new weapons systems turned out way more complicated than we expected at first. Implementation and especially bug-fixing along with quality-of-life improvements were our primary focus. There might be lack of content, however, we did what we could to make this Demo a much more refined and fun experience, compared to previous one.
We are very grateful to everyone who took part in our recent closed playtests and gave us feedback. Most of the appeared issues were taken care of.
Hopefully, this release will be worth the wait.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3654230/