Weekly Update #82 - On the way to Early Access with a brand new steamy teaser

Hey all,

On the menu this week, a progress update on the new app implementation, and a brand new artwork teaser!

I'm still progressing towards feature-completeness for the new app, which is definitely a beefy task and more work than anticipated. I wanted the new gameplay phase to allow the player to poke around in another character's device, and that means all the different apps.

Of course, to each app its own set of technical difficulties! Decoupling all the models to the player-specific data is a good thing however as it's a step towards a more generic framework, which facilitates a lot of cool things in the long term: custom stories & characters, sandbox hacking... It's a bit overkill for now, but it will only improve the codebase for future endeavors.

For now, I have a decently working prototype, almost ready for early access release provided that I implement the additional workflows : how the app is integrated to the script, what it does when there's nothing to connect to, etc.

I have multiple apps working in the first phase of the story, with a bunch of hidden things to uncover and little puzzles to solve to progress forwards.

It's slowly shaping up but there's still a lot of work to make it robust and polished! My short term goal being of course having a "good enough", stable build suitable for early access.

I know we're stretching the schedule but to help you guys wait for the release, I have a brand new artwork teaser featuring, once again, the new character... and I think you might spot a timely reference!

Hope you guys enjoy this one, it's a bit different from what I usually do but it will still likely be used as an in-game asset! I think I might do more illustrations like this in the future, following current trends or lil' challenges for the kick of it.

Now bear with me, we're heading towards Early Access, and hopefully before GTA VI releases 😁

Have a great one, and stay tuned for more updates!