To all adventurers!

Hello everyone! We would like to inform you that a new closed alpha test has started for City of Springs! Weve worked hard on the game since the last time some of you had the chance of playing it. Now, we got the full first chapter of the game available for you to try and play.
From 2 March until 12 March you have the opportunity to participate in this new test. Take your time while playing and of course, enjoy! We cant wait to hear what you think, positive or negative, so we can make City of Springs the best game possible. If you could provide this form with your feedback after your playtest, that would be greatly appreciated.

See you in the City of Springs!

City of Springs will be showcased in the #Indigo22 livestream.

Take a tour through Riveton and meet Val in today's livestream Friday July 17th 11:15-11:45 CEST Twitch:Indigo Showcase

-Matthijs Kramer, Creative Director, Alterego Games. You turn a street corner and stare straight at the back of a big robot. Right past him, you see a valuable Modification chest, with just the parts you need for your next mission. You take a look at your bag of metal scrap, barely half full with gears and sprockets you can use to craft something in combat. Is it enough to go toe-to-toe with the robot? Maybe you should try to sneak past it to get to the chest? Run, when he turns left Best not to take any chances. Stealthing and combat go hand in hand in City of Springs. Lets bring you up to speed on City of Springs core gameplay! Phase 1 Stealth
We knew we wanted to implement stealth in this game and were inspired by the mechanics of the metal gear solid games and the more recent persona 5. In CoS, Stealth will not be the main focus of the game, but it does play a tremendously big role. Early prototypes had us sneak past dangerous looking cylinders in abstract white areas where we tested character speed, detection range, and the shape of area wherein the guards would detect your character.
We tested with more complicated setups, where one guard has multiple collectibles they are safeguarding. We provided the player with several vantage points from which to observe the guards behavior to formulate a plan of attack. Objects were added which the player could trigger from a distance to distract the guards. Initially these were placeholder items which symbolized ringing a bell or breaking a glass bottle.
Now all of these ideas worked nicely enough in the prototype, but while playtesting with a select part of the community we quickly noticed two issues pop up. A) Players were using the newly added run feature to run past their targets, and get out safely without a scratch on them. They were bull rushing the stealth puzzles to the point that stealthing was rarely the best option. Much of the designed stealthing areas felt bland to our players, seeing as they could simply run past all of it. B) Visually it was hard to see where the guards were looking. Players who did try to sneak past, ended up being caught time and again even after having made a solid plan of attack.
To remedy this, our design team went through the hundreds of lines of feedback, talked with the dev team about the possibilities, and created a new feature for the Stealth gameplay; Sneak-mode. Crouching previously made it more difficult to be seen, as your character was now small enough to hide behind crates. But with this new feature, while you are in stealth mode, all the things you can interact with are highlighted, and the lines of sight of the guards and cameras is now clearly communicated to the player. This gives the player the tools they need to navigate the guarded streets of Riveton, and it brought back the planning-phase which we liked so much in our earlier prototype. To top it off, Health is no longer a mechanic isolated to combat. If you are spotted by cameras nearby deployment centers will launch bots against you that damage your health. This makes it so that running past some cameras is still an option, but youll have to be willing and able to pay the bloody price! Our devs are finishing up their work on a new playtest build in which we can test, together with our community, just how much the new stealth has improved. Well hopefully uncover features that still need tweaking, need to be added (or taken away) for our stealth mechanic to become solid. People tend to assume that a games design is set in stone when a developer is this far into a project. But as you can see, weve implemented quite a lot of changed since our playtests! Community feedback is of vital importance to us. If youve got any thoughts to share, dont hesitate to post them here, or even reach out to us. Join us on discord if you want to chat with us about the game, or check out our other cool projects.

-Matthijs Kramer, Creative Director, Alterego Games. Its 2021 our second adventure game was being prepared for launch, and we had to start thinking about a new project. We knew we wanted to do something in the Adventure Genre, but theres a million directions to go from there. Do you go with an idea you know will sell well? Do you continue working on a previous project in the form of a sequel? (and theres been more than one person asking us to make Woven 2) Somehow we ended up developing a gearpunk adventure game where you build a drone army to battle against injustice. What happened?
Theme - Gearpunk We usually start with a theme to get us concepting in the right direction. All of us have this shared love for steampunk. Even though some team members, whom I wont name (dominic), wanted to make a sci-fi space opera, the steampunk love won in the end and we managed to settle on a theme. Theres this sort of scale within the steampunk genre. Theres the most well-known version, the full Victorian Steampunk, in the middle. To the right youll find the dark and gritty dieselpunk where technology has advanced some more. To its left it has gearpunk, which is more lighter and usually has less technological advancement. Not a whole lot of people use Gearpunk, and we liked that little thing the subgenre does where you dont get depressed when looking at concept art.
The first concept art sat really well with the team and got everyone excited, we found ourselves in a great place to start concepting some story elements. Story A Rebels Quest There are many stories to tell in a Gearpunk setting, but we wanted something with a cheeky rebellious spirit to it. Some creatives on the team wanted the narrative to touch on the importance of freedom, whilst others wanted the game in some way to reflect on the climate change mankind is facing. Our main writer really wanted to write a female character lead, and the start of City of Springs was born. You play Val, a rebel at heart, who lives a hard life in the last city on earth, surrounded by wastelands. Shes a mechanic, brilliant at fixing things, and when confronted with the cruelty of the regime that governs the city, she takes it upon herself to do something about the situation. She wants the people of Riveton to be free, and if it takes a revolution to do so, shell start one.
Gameplay Tactical Combat Content-wise, our previous titles had more focus on the narrative than on the gameplay. We had some cool obstacle courses in Woven, and some scary stealthy action in Sanity of Morris, but for City of Springs we wanted gameplay to be central in the games design. We knew we were itching to create combat game mechanics for our next title. Something fun to do, easy to learn, but complex to master, that players could really spend time with. The idea of a tinkerer making her own makeshift drones from the scrap she finds of the street stuck with us. The concept of drone-based combat was born from that idea. In city of Springs youll fight guards armed with tons of drones with a small army of your own makeshift drones. Youll have to observe the types of robots your opponents are using to attack you, and act accordingly if you want to strike them where theyre weakest.
There are a few more core concepts of this game such as stealth and questing. But this post is already waaaaay longer than what I was supposed to write. Stay tuned for more City of Springs logs in the coming months where well tell you all about those features! Join us on discord if you want to chat with us.