Blood in the Panopticon · published
As I have probably mentioned before, I originally planned to make this game as a learning experience. I never intended for it to be anything substantial.
But days went by... I kept adding features, writing more dialogue, designing more game mechanics...
And I somehow found myself with a pretty substantial game. A game that I somehow did not get bored of even after play-testing it for 100+ hours.
But despite all the effort I have put into polishing this thing and getting it nice and presentable, there is a limit to what a single dude can do. And as the saying goes: "Nothing is ever perfect". But we can get close.
So once you have the game in your hands I'll go turbo mode on fixing any early issues you might encounter. Once that has settled, I'll collect, organize and analyze every little bit of feedback this game receives. Then I'll get back to work.
Thus, in a more concrete manner, this is the plan:
Weeks 1&2 -> Critical bug fixing
Late September -> First big update. This will consist mostly of qualitative improvements following your feedback.
October - November -> General bug-fixing.
December -> Second free update. This one will be more quantitative. Here is where the most requested features will arrive, together with more gameplay, story and art.
2027 -> I will continue fixing bugs and implementing feedback. I do not have a concrete plan for when big updates will arrive, but I do have some things planned.
Now about the event.
I got a new demo out just in time for it. It is a slightly older build than what I am preparing now for the release but you can still see a billion improvements over the first demo from Next Fest.
As for what you'll be able to do in the demo:
Do a few runs
Fight all the enemies in the game with the exception of a few bosses
Use all the available Base and Combat Upgrades
Talk a bit with C424
You could probably do one or two side-quests
But you will not be able to see any of the branching narrative stuff. You will not be able to begin the romance route with C424 if Androids are your thing. You will not be able to finish any of the side-stories.
I wanna show you something neat.
So I made myself this tool that allows me to see all the dialogue as a graph. And that made me realize that I kinda undersold the "branching narrative" part of the game. Here's A FEW BITS of the full graph:
What does all this mean? The nodes are unique conversations. Green lines mean causality. Blue lines mean player dialogue choice. As you can see, a certain conversation can cause a bunch of other conversations to appear. HOWEVER, which of these conversations you will see depends on a bunch of factors that cannot be visualized on this graph. These factors include: What other content you completed, how well you performed in combat, what NPCs you met, how well you are getting along with C424 and so on. What this means is that, sometimes, even though you might only have 2 dialogue choices, there might actually be 3 or more possible outcomes, depending on, for example, how well you've been treating C424 up to that point.
Why I did all this? Because I wanted C424 to actually respond to what you are doing in a believable manner.
Why am I telling you this? Because if, at any point, you feel like a conversation is a bit out of place... THAT'S A BUG PLEASE REPORT IT THANK YOU SO MUCH.
I made a new trailer to celebrate the "almost ready" state of the game and the upcoming Cyberpunk Fest. You can watch it on the Sore Page or in 4k on YouTube: