Firebreak Dev Update - Testing Begins
AL : See above, a picture of Stoya making the new UI. It's CRAZY.
Back to our program.
As the script and story continue refinement in post-production, the initial scenes and framework have been released to the beta team to begin working through issues.
While some design items have been flagged for improvement, and we're evaluating performance across multiple platforms, the actual development of the engine is largely complete. Other than mitigating any identified performance bottlenecks and fixing any navigation intuitiveness issues, all that remains is content delivery, which is really what we're all here for.
Here's what you can expect:
The platform has been rebuilt from the ground up. The user interface is leveraging many of the new capabilities of Ren'Py, and benefitting from the lessons learned on our last project.
The feature list at launch will include:
-Unified Steam and Patron build
-Local and cloud achievements
-Image gallery
-Scene gallery
-Character dossiers
-Guided mode (Hint and Verbose options)
-Full-featured messenger capable of delivering images, emoji, video, and audio.
A lot is also going on under the hood. We've developed a custom shading and vignetting tool that saves time because we can apply tintmatrix effects and other filters to raw images used in the UI and in game that would have normally required individual Photoshopping.
Guided mode can be enabled at the expense of disabling unlockables. We're still working around the penalty regime, but in hint mode, you'll just get a color and symbol flag that identifies if a choice has very positive, positive, neutral, trade-off, or negative consequences. In "verbose" mode, it will identify precisely what stats the choice modifies and by how much. It may also provide path notes.
The game is architected on a native 4K resolution, but the default launch size will be windowed 1080p. This is mostly to ensure folks who game at higher resolutions won't have to suffer with lesser image quality, but the default size won't overwhelm players at standard resolutions.
What's left mechanically are the two modules that I've been dreading most:
The import module, since it will need to be capable of importing Chasing Sunsets variables from both the release versions (Steam and Patron) as well as the Remastered version pending release.
The second is a specialized pixel shader I've been dabbling with that will provide antialiasing and a specialized look for the messaging module. This is a story-driven requirement, but ended up requiring quite a bit more work than I had initially planned on. The messenger largely tuned out how I wanted, but some of the display transforms made it pixellated and showed too many jaggies on angled straight lines. The only solution was to scrap the idea or craft a custom pixel shader.
Anyway, having content in the testers' hands and being able to recalibrate based on feedback is a good place to be. Updates should become more frequent now as we close in on launch.
Thank you all for your continued support!
Stoya