HAX

We've been at this for quite a while now. Sometimes it is hard to come up with a positive spin about our progress, or the lack of it. That said, the 2012 kick-off was genuinely good. We met, identified a major obstacle and roadblock that has been dragging us down like a stuck anchor and came up with a solution that will bypass the problem entirely. It means some serious re-design for some of the core mechanics but cuts down a lot of the programming tasks. All in all makes the planned launch version features much more manageable. Even if we are still in the valley of death, I am optimistic. This was a kick in the pants, in a good way. When you are doing garage development on zero budget, that's what you live for.

In other news, it has been revealed that the development budget for Star Wars: The Old Republic was 500 million dollars. For the sake of the entire MMORPG market I sincerely hope it was worth it. If it was not, the public image hit from the SWTOR bursting bubble is not going to spare anybody, including us. And marketing is and will always be our biggest challenge.

Getting the lead programmer back from Florida alive and well (as opposed to him turning into a person-shaped hole in the ground) was good but the progress made by our lead artist has been even better. He has been churning out webcomic strips for the storyline missions and continues to do an amazing job at it. We have to rewrite one of those missions (my foul-up, not his) but other than that content track is doing well. Now, with the roadblock/landmine removed and our assistant programmer showing signs of life, I hope the tech side can catch up.   

So, we're back. But that was given.

We're also in a good mood. That's news.

The summer was quiet but we've been busy since then. Much of the user interface is now complete and the Lead Artist is immersing himself into the storyline mission graphics. There is going to be a change in the graphical style (to facilitate creating more art quicker, we can't afford to fool around) and I am hoping to be able to provide samples of it next week.

We have been very much inspired by other games that have or are about to come out this summer and fall. The biggest of all was obviously Deus Ex: Human Revolution, where especially the hub city of Henghsai made us drool until our keyboards short-circuited. Then there will be Hard Reset, Rage and the just-now announced Syndicate. This is a good time to be a cyberpunk.

I am about to start creating the proper texts and the coding department is fiddling with fine tuning and emergent bugs in what seems to last forever (and it usually does). Then again, we got our second programmer back from ”a personal leave of absence”, so with more coding power that bottleneck should sort itself out soon.

Still, ”nothing new on the western front” and stuff. I can see why other long-lasting projects have year-long radio silences. Our next public office will be at Alternative Party (Oct 21-23). By then I hope we will be testing the gameplay (basically playing the same level over and over again, recording bugs and omissions). 

We are back! From the Summer pastures. The Assembly Demo Event in Helsinki has come to mark the official end of the Wirepunk summer season. With everybody back in the capital area, we will be meeting as often we can and sitting down in the evenings to work on HAX. It will be done when it is done but it is moving forward. Since we don't have investors beyond our own back pockets, there is no one to pull the plug.

So HAX will be done. Sooner or later.

Basically, our immediate goals remains a single, feature-complete level and to that end many things feel like polish, although they are actually content creation, like the minimap graphics. The picture in this entry shows the program icons for the four primary programs you start with. You can level them up to 10 and if that is not enough and you are not short of MEM, buy 8 more.

One major design change has been the cloud-oriented Link and cloud-specific hax-codes. Originally HAX Codes were permanent level-specific upgrades but since our levels consist of "stacks" of similar levels with increasing security ratings, we changed the concept of stacks into clouds and HAX Codes acquired in one network apply to every network in that cloud. For ComNet this is an almost exploit as the security ratings go from 1 to 5. You can now grind ComNet 1 to get all the HAX Codes and they are just as good four security levels up.

Also, the concept of tags has been changed to "gangs" simply because it is much easier to explain. Gangs are interest groups within the HAX subculture. You can join 1 gang for very 1.0 of threat rating you have. There are no restrictions, so belonging in a gang does not make anyone your friend. However, it does enamble runner sync teams and every now and then you come across some loot that is worthless to you but will be uploaded to the gang, so that everybody can see that "Arkangel uploaded sim-porn for 1 cs!" If you are in a big and active gang, those one-stock gains may start to add up.

Clouds and gangs have the side effects that the chat now remains the same in both Link and Hideout modes, except that in the Link you always have the Log channel for system messages, loot lists and stuff. And the Link access page in the hideout now highlights clouds rather than individual levels but that is mostly cosmetic stuff.

So there. Don't worry, we will not change our name to Vaporpunk!

Another self-imposed deadline missed. This is the downside of garage development: job troubles, family problems, vacation seasons... both myself and our Lead Artist were laid off from our respective dayjobs while the Lead Programmer switched his.  Contrary to what one might assume, the increase of free time is not really conducive to spare-time projects when you are looking for your next job. I probably have one in the pipeline but of course nothing is real until its signed.   

In short, we are starved of programmer time and nothing, NOTHING, happens without coding. Although it is not going to fix the issue I am planning on taking up some programming course in the Fall and try to make myself more useful to Wirepunk in the future.

What is happening right now is that while the programmers make what I hope are the finishing touches to the mob behaviour, me and the artist will make the assets for the Hideout user interface. When they are done, we can hopefully test the full basic gameplay with all level 1 software in the Link: a situation I would have liked us to be in March, honestly.     

Besides playtesting (well, just testing really at this point), I'll start writing a WikiManual for HAX, open to the public from day one. Some chapters will obviously remain "Coming Soon" as things like the design for the system to create avatars is still in flux. But what I can write, I will. If you keep up with it, you'll know how to play HAX long before the game comes out.