After well over a year of development, we're pleased to announce that Artificial Nexus is now out! Inspired by some of our favourite games like Snatcher, Virtue's Last Reward, and AI: The Somnium Files - as well as a few unorthodox games, like Operator's Side/Lifeline - our game has you trying to escape from a mysterious facility while solving the mystery of who the protagonist, Susan, is.

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Its the start of April, so you know what that means: its time for an update on Artificial Nexus, and the development progress over the course of March. (As an aside, I probably should be posting these at the end of each month, since this might make it sound like this is the progress done across April, but hey, Ive established a pattern now, and Im sticking to it). Anyway, the development progress over March has been very positive! I mentioned in last months post that there was a small delay as a result of issues with the voice acting - those issues have now been resolved, and the remaining voice lines have been recorded. With that final step done, this means that the game is nearly completed! To make sure that everythings as high-quality as it can be, the game is currently going through a round of playtesting with a small group. Once thats finished, therell be a bit of extra development to make changes in accordance with any feedback - fixing bugs, removing ambiguities in the text, and any other updates to make the game run as smoothly as possible - before the game will be ready to release. As Im anticipating that the required changes will be small, Im pleased to announce that the planned release date for Artificial Nexus will be the 17th of April! Steam is currently in the process of approving the game, so everything should be fairly on track for it. Naturally, if the date becomes untenable, Ill post updates, but even so I highly doubt any sort of delay would be more than one or two weeks at most. If you havent wishlisted Artificial Nexus yet, then please make sure you do so, so that you can purchase it as soon as its out! Naturally, its going to release with a discount, meaning that on release it will be cheaper than if you delay purchasing it. Finally, while the demo of the game was given a large update in February, some more small changes have been made to the full game since then. The demo has been updated to reflect the changes, namely:

• The maps displayed when moving or viewing the full map have a blue-grey border to help differentiate them from the background.
• Fixed a bug where pressing Enter while hovering the mouse over a button on some screens would trigger a click on that button
• Added in some new partially-voiced lines
• Updated some existing dialogue to use more appropriate partially-voiced lines

As we move closer to the release of the full game, more and more work is being done, and so naturally it helps to keep the demo in sync! The following changes have been made:

• The maps (displayed both when moving and when viewing the full map) now have a blue-grey border to help separate them from the backgrounds
• Fixed up a bug where pressing Enter would trigger a click if the mouse was hovered over a button
• Changed multiple voice lines for side conversations and added some new ones

Firstly, a bit of a whoops to confess to - for the past few months, I've been posting monthly devlogs of the game's progress, but didn't think to post them on Steam because I'm an idiot. If you'd like to read them, you can do so on my website. Regarding progress on Artificial Nexus across the month of February - it's a bit of a mixture of good and bad news. Sorry, folks, thats just the way that it is at times - but if you keep reading on, youll see that its more good than bad news! Well start with the bad news, so that you can have the good news for dessert. I mentioned in last months devlog post that the voice acting was coming along nicely. Unfortunately, one of the voice actors has gotten sick, which has caused a delay in recording their lines. Theres not much that can be done about this, naturally, so all that can be done is waiting for them to get better and then to get around to recording when they can. Its caused a delay, but hopefully one that wont be too large in the grand scheme of things. On to the good news! The following is some of what was done over February:

• The big news, if you havent seen it yet: the demo for Artificial Nexus has been updated! The most notable difference is updating the backgrounds to a new style, but there are a tonne of other quality of life changes too - you can press Enter to submit an input, clear notes, name your save games, and many more things! Check out our update post for more details, and check out the demo if you havent already!
• Some content has been updated in accordance with the new artwork, giving more items to examine and corresponding text.
• Fixed a major bug that affected loading a saved game after a certain point in the game.
• Updated an unlockable to use a different method involving a mini-game, as the existing method was fairly unintuitive.
• Added in new secrets to the game (yes, I realise this doesnt tell you much)
• Multiple small script updates
• Multiple bugfixes

To quote Professor Farnsworth: good news, everyone! I mentioned in a devlog post on my site that the demo for the game had been undergoing some updates in January. These changes have now been pushed live in preparation for the full version of the game, and now include such things as:

• New background artwork
• You can now press Enter to submit any input fields (in addition to clicking a button)
• You get a display when new notes are added
• Notes can be toggled on or off
• The in-game messaging system now uses avatars for most characters
• Unread messages and notes are marked with a red circle
• The UI for preferences has been greatly updated
• Saved games can be named (if you're the sort of weirdo who makes saves in the middle of a demo)
• Swapping accessories utilises a larger clickable area
• Many other small quality of life changes