The Last Mile on the Road 🛣️ to Release
Yoooooooo! What's up, dude?!
Hey there! Lucas here, introducing myself to you again after more than a year and a half of introducing myself at the start of each month's newsletter. 😆
We're locked in for our release on 15 April (oh, do you remember me setting a different release date for our three Null State games?? weird). The team has been steadily knocking out bugs (especially Billy and Robin, from Hobfield Games, and Pip Simms), and we've got a pretty clear road to release at this point.
One tough decision I had to make in March was to remove German localizations from our three games. After reviewing the stats we gathered during Next Fest, as well as gathering feedback from a few German cyberpunk fans in my circle of friends, I decided to stop DE localization and focus our efforts on the languages we need for the team to share their work with their families (ES-LA, FR-FR, and PT-BR). A big thanks goes to Dave (.avodavo on Discord) and Hans (Warlocs) for all of their efforts and hard work on these three games!
I want to make sure to also give a big thanks to Indium Play, who has been instrumental in working with us on testing and QA tasks over the last 18 months. Since we started working together, we've been trying a new approach to scheduling which has worked surprisingly well – and I hope we'll continue to work together under this new approach in the future!
One Last Job Updates
Alongside a handful of mid-severity bugs that have been fixed, Robin has also done a good bit of work on communicating more information to the player around how their crew's play affects the final result of a job.
It's detail work that will matter a lot to players who want to understand the mechanics (in order to make optimal decisions).
Another Round Updates
We've got full controller support in Another Round, across all menus, and I'm happy to say that it plays great on Steam Deck!
Also, during Next Fest, there were a few players who asked what the point was to generating bigger-numbered cards (something that happens w/ straights). They made a really good point – originally, the numbers had been important to generating resources, but... having removed those resources some months ago... we no longer had a gameplay reason for the numbers to go up!
So I was pleased when we were able to revive a feature which was previously shelved as a dead end: Jaded cards!
Jaded cards won't generate any vibe at the end of the night (though they'll still partipate in number-based combos), and will be the first culled from the deck in case the vibe of The Old Fashioned drops too low. These are a fun and interesting new dimension to play; Heloisa (Behance) and Robin did a great job getting these cards into the game!
Null State Updates
There have been 351 commits (groups of changes) for Null State since the last newsletter went out. Although the number of commits on a project usually doesn't tell you anything interesting, it's worth noting this is almost 3x as many changes as were made in the months prior. Whew, that's a LOT of work!
A big chunk of that effort came from Pip revising their storylines to make sure they work and are sensible (and what great storylines we've got for you!). I really wish I could say more without spoiling all of their surprises, but... I can't! no! I... okay, fine, just a little peek:
Another portion of those modifications can be attributed to Billy, who's been fixing up some issues we had around localization and audio – while also introducing the 1.0 2.0 version of the package manager into Null State!
The pack manager gives the player a choice on what storylines will be available when they go to play the game each time they create a new character. This is a key feature to allow others to tell their own stories – using the Null State game engine. It looks great, and I'm so pleased we could get to that before we ship Null State.
Finally, Robin has had his hands in pretty much every system in the game over the last month... with great results! You should probably just click through and watch the trailer to see how good the networks look, how interesting combat will be, and how everything has come together into a really special & suspenseful cyberpunk hacking game!
(And of course, always in the background, our localization partners managed to get the whole game localized – all ~80k words! – just in time... for a release date I pushed so we could fix more bugs before we ship. HUGE THANKS to Bea (X), Clément & Mery (homepage), and Daniel (clane_k on Discord) for everything they've done; I'm so excited for everyone to get to share these games w/ their friends and families, thanks to your work!)
Alright, for real though: these games are shipping 15 April?
I mean... I'm pretty sure, yeah! There's still things that could go wrong, and stuff that might sneak up on & surprise me... but yeah! I think we're almost there, and I'm excited to switch into the next phase once these drop: adding more storylines, adding more datapacks, and having fun seeing the kinds of stories people tell within the Null State universe!
With that said: if you want to check out the changes we've made, all of the games have their demos up to date with these features (except jaded cards in Another Round, which only happen after major events) – so, you can go check them out right now!
