Sometimes it feels like these late winter months go too fast. How is March over already!? It has been a very productive month with every team member hard at work on adding new features, creating exciting content, and polishing the game in preparation for the Alpha v2 return. The biggest two internal projects - the UX implementation and L2 pipeline are chugging along. Were definitely in the grind now, which is a heads-down crunch to the end but without the crazy overtime or deadline induced stress. Another big month and a lot of progress - lets check out some highlights!

New Game: Picking your Backstory, Origin Story and Team

This month weve made big strides improving the new game setup for the Cyber Knights alpha. Where previously there were few options and every game started the same, weve now introduced three sets of choices which combine to create very different starting points for each game. The first is your Backstory, which tells the story of your life before you reached this point. Were you raised on the unforgiving streets of the Wards under a radioactive sky, were you brought up in the plush luxury of a corporate tower preparing for your aptitude tests or trained up as a milsec contractor? Your Backstory will define some of your initial Contacts when the game starts, your starting Attribute package and many of your characters metadata tags describing their faction, connections, skills and more. There will be numerous backstory options. The second choice is your Origin Story which answers the question of how you came to have a Cyber Knights quantum rider surgically and irrevocably spliced into your spine. The first Origin Story in the game will be Syndicate Debts, in which you and your friends have pulled together everything you had and taken a massive loan from a Syndicate financier to afford the installation of a Cyber Knights computer. The stretch goal Valkyrie Zero and the Kickstarter add-on Horizon Cypher are both Origin Stories. There will only be a handful of origin story options. As well as explaining your new cybernetic, your Origin Story sets up one of the big story arcs for the first act of the game and this story will include a set of Contacts -- be they friends or enemies. The final set of choices will be to pick your team from a list of available character templates. Youll be filling up the slots for your team from a few locked slots -- your team needs a Face, a Vanguard and a Hacker -- as well as a few free slots -- your pick of Soldiers, Snipers, Cyberswords, another Vanguard, etc. There will be numerous character template options. Each templated character you pick will have a starting name, character visual (both of which can be changed), their own Backstory, special starting equipment, optional cybernetics and at least one Contact that they know. As a sum total -- your Backstory, Origin Story and team picks will give you a strong starting foundation for your covert merc team and aims to deliver on classic tabletop RPG feels -- youll have friends and enemies, faction connections, a variety of skills and abilities and trouble already knocking at your door.

Cont. L2 Mission Pipeline

The L2 pipeline is going to roar onward from here for... well, possibly years from now. Were working every day to design new levels, challenges, and improve and refine the ones we have while also beautifying everything. Levels are now assembling into awesome heist storylines full of surprises and complications and it's feeling great. In a new and exciting development, weve added new tools for the level designers to be able to add, move, or remove key elements such as enemy spawning locations, patrol paths, security devices, and loot boxes in any map based on the storyline it is being played in. This is a huge boost in replayability for the levels; when combined with the existing ability to change entry, exit, and objectives based on the storyline, now these level spaces can be reconfigured to have completely different objectives, challenges, and rewards, such as a raid to steal loot, an escape route out of a heist, or a kidnapping mission, to name a few examples.

Cont. UX Implementation

March saw major progress across the UX implementation project, we are now nearly complete with the mission map UX with only less than 10 items still kicking around needing attention and of course, some bug hunting to wrap up. That has allowed us to move on to the Matrix UX where progress has been rapid so far. The Matrix Mk2 HUD has taken shape, weve completed the addition of missing features for hack-only missions and were closing in on starting the big central node map which is the core of the work and the key part to beautify.
A very ugly WIP Hacking screen with some of the HUD elements replaced -- there are nice things starting to gather in the corners but the main of the screen is not pleasing The final visual designs for the Safehouse screens are being handed off for review on a daily basis now, and were building up a growing style library of shared components that will help speed up the implementation once we get into the more menu-focused tasks in the safehouse.

Reward and Stretch Goal Progress

For completeness, we include the progress bar infographic in each and every update. If you have any questions about rewards or stretch goals, check out the graphic or reach out to us. Were continuing to work on and refine the design of the Digital Artbook pages and push this reward toward completion. We have also started work on the Lorebook in earnest now. It will be quite a process -- gathering the lore notes from many sources, paper and separate Google Docs from all these years working on this game world and pulling them together into a single, well-organized tome of lore.