Dec 5, 2024 5 min read Null State

Null State's demo 💿 is almost here!

And you'll be the first to play it (in time for the holidays?? 🎁)

Long-time reader rewards are almost here!

Whew, okay, thanks for clicking in and giving this a read – I hope you know how much I appreciate that you always take a minute to come through and read what our team is doing here @ Triple Eye every month. :)

As predicted last time, the Triple Eye triple store page launch is around the corner – we're just doing a few asset touch-ups before marking the pages live (and starting the bulk of our marketing activities). I'll be sure to send you an email once they're all in place... to see if you'd like to play all three games' demos before anyone else!

These demos won't be available to the public before sometime next year; I want to share them with you now, though, because: 1) I value your input, and 2) I want to show you how much I appreciate that you've been along on this ride from... well, pretty much the beginning!

I'll ping you in a week or two and ask if you'd be interested in some demo keys – sound good? okay! With all of that out of the way, let's check what we've done in November!

Null State

Demos & Datapacks

I've told you before about how important datapacks are for the way we're making Triple Eye games. It turns out, datapacks were also important for us to break a demo-sized chunk of storytelling out of the full body of work coming next year!

In Null State, a datapack can contain a lot of different things: contacts (and their photos); dialogue trees for those contacts; jobs and networks associated with those conversations; downloadable software to find in those networks; and the localization for all of those things (I'll come back to this in a minute!). Generally speaking, you'd want to try and fit a full storyline into a single, self-contained datapack; that way, if you wanted to make a datapack and share it with your friends, they'd just need to drop that one folder into place and voila!

The demo presents three datapacks (all written by Pip - site):

the game's tutorial (with only minor tweaks) which has you doing a few "trial run"-type jobs for Sid, the local conspiracy theorist and... your mentor;
the first full storyline of the game, called "Vertical Appreciation Day" (this is Sid being ironic – he doesn't appreciate the Verticals at all!); and
an in-game message board (what cyberpunk game is complete without a message board??).

Pip has done an excellent job of making Sid just the right amount of hilariously unhinged and deadly serious. Sid will direct a lot of your activity early on, so hopefully you appreciate him!

For the end of the demo, Pip has done a bit of really clever writing to invite you to wishlist the game – I look forward to hearing what you think about it!

Localization

Null State is an RPG at its heart, and that means a lot of text has to unspool through conversations with other characters (don't worry, you'll get the chance to talk to other folks than just Sid!). There's also plenty of other text (e.g. - job summaries, software descriptions, network node menus, etc.) which the player can read as they play. Game lore!

There's a surprising amount of text in any game, but RPGs are especially text-heavy since they usually aim to tell a story.

Billy (linktree) has spent more than a couple hours of his life over the last year getting all of that text working with Chatterbox (github), while Pip and Dean have been busy writing all of the conversations up in Yarn (site) – with Alasdair (homepage) providing support on creating the necessary JSON files for jobs, items, networks, and so on to link many of those conversations into a continuous chain of (exciting!) events.

So... with all of that work behind us... how do we get this corpus of text localized into French, German, Brazilian Portuguese, and Spanish??

Well, that brings us back to Billy, who has built us a few tools to scrape all of the localizable data out of a datapack to serve it up in a way that we can easily import it all into a Google sheet, then scrape it all back into the datapack for distribution.

I promise, this is really interesting stuff for anyone who's into video game localization! If that's not you, well... you can always take a look to see what words you know!

It's a tidy, custom-build solution that does everything exactly how it needs to be done so that our localization folks can do their job and see the results in-game without much effort.

Bravo, Billy!

Look & Feel

Heloisa (Behance) has been working on bringing some life to the look & feel of the game. That's still a long road we'll be walking between now and when Null State ships; we're getting there day by day, though!

Take a look here at a few of the options a player can choose from when setting up their "online" identity (character creation). I love these!

Can you guess why, of all of the animals in the world, I've asked her for these ones??

You've also unknowingly seen examples of a small change that Robin (linktree) made in the screenshots above: the screens are using a new shader which I think makes them look great; very retro, as this ancient tech (provided by Sid!) should feel (btw, a lot of November, Robin spent either fixing some last few bugs from the changes we were making to Another Round or making a new trailer for the game's store page – he'll have some really radical changes to show us in the next newsletter!).

Until Next Time, Chummer

Thanks again for sticking with us here at Triple Eye through all of these monthly newsletters. I look forward to sharing w/ you (in the very near future) the demos for Another Round, One Last Job, and Null State!

See you on the flipside, kiddo.