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[Retropunch]

Retropunch, I do have one question about the city that you are planning to set that game in. Is that city's background also going to be randomly generated? Or have you already got a preset city background ready, and the only thing that differs is the districts and the megacorps?
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I also have one idea for a background for the randomly generated corporation, but I am not sure if you are already done with the "random corporation generator". It's not really all that important an idea anyway; I just wanted to have the generator hit all the 'evil nonprofits' angles.
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And finally, ETA on a demo release?

We're hoping to procedural/randomly generate pretty much everything, other than the main city layout. However, we're easing off that for the moment as we need to get more of the main mechanics in. If you have any suggestions/more items, feel free to PM them to me though!

Unfortunately the other developer has moved house so things are going a bit slowly, although we hope to get a very early alpha version out in the next few weeks. We're also trying to find someone new to do tiles, so if anyone has any experience and would like to help it'd be great to get you on board!

[Scoops Novel]

Is it particularly hard to get in-character responses from the chatbot? I'll be honest, I'm wondering why more games don't do it.

[Uristides]

Posting to Watch and Remember to Try it Later.

This world needs more cyberpunk roguelikes.

[Servant Corps]

I wouldn't be surprised if CyberRogue has been abandoned or placed on "permanent pause", simply because (according to this thread) some of the team members had stepped away and Retropunch plans on returning back to the project later if those team members come back.

In other words, I was right to write about "evil* non-profits" in the history generator. It has appeared that the Gates Foundation has spent over 200 million dollars to implement the "Common Core" educational standards in the United States, and while I'm not making any judgment on whether Common Core is a good idea or not, you can expect that some people are going to be pretty upset at some rich billionaire trying to dictate government policies.

*Evil, of course, is in the eye of the beholder. After all, the Gates Foundation has also provided funding to Khan Academy, and Khan isn't that immoral...right?

[Retropunch]

It's been placed on pause but certainly not abandoned! The problem was that with CyberRogue we felt we were pushing out in lots of different directions and it was just becoming a bit of a mess. The combat wasn't as good as we needed it to be (it felt too much of a shootery/hack and slash sort of thing) and while the 'simulation' bits were going well, it was basically shoehorned onto a standard roguelike framework/engine.

So we're currently working on a much more contained and straight forward roguelike (which still has a cyberpunk/futuristic theme to it) so that we can really get the combat down well and get a bit more general experience. We'll then be moving on to ripping out the bits that we need from CyberRogue and making a much firmer base for a true simulation.

As for the chatbot experiences, its a tricky one. On the one hand, being able to talk to any NPCs (at least to a point) was great. You could go into a bar and just talk (if you kept within the boundaries), this is fun, but it's almost like the closer you get to 'conversation' the worse it is not being able to actually talk naturally. Secondly, there was the problem of just not being able to have individual memories for every single NPC (as we wanted hundreds). This meant that you always started a conversation as if you were strangers, which was jarring. Lastly, the general problem of having to work out all the things that a player might say is tricky. That last one isn't as bad as it seems though, as it's much simpler in the boundaries of a game world than if you were trying to do a general chatbot.

All in all, expect more to come but it will be a bit slow. To tide you over, here's a picture of a gun from the new game:

[Parsely]

That's a really good looking pistol.

[Retropunch]

That's a really good looking pistol.

Thanks, I've been working on a few designs as that was actually a pretty major thing that CyberRogue lacked. Whilst we had a lot of thematic stuff, we didn't really have a complete 'unique atmosphere' so I've been trying to get a coherent overall design.

This new RL is a bit of a mix between Space Hulk and DoomRL, but tries to be both as tactical (short term decisions like cover based shooting, types of melee attacks) and strategic (long term decisions on things like disease, corruption, scarce resources). This will ostensibly end up being the fighting part of CyberRogue, as well as work out some of the best ways to do stuff with the engine.

I'll make a new post when it's in an alpha state, although I might add a few more bits on here as things progress.

[Servant Corps]

I might be overthinking the Heretic Pistol, but it does seem like the only people who would proudly use such a pistol would be "outsiders" who are already loathed by the rest of civilized society. (Religious people would like to use the term "heretics", but only against their enemies, and probably wouldn't want to use a pistol named Heretic.)

And the only "outsiders" that I can think of are anti-globalization protesters, the people who hate the current cyberpunk system and want to change or destroy it. They do appear to be the least bad guys in the setting, as the chaos that results when corporations start shooting at each other might not be pretty or healthy.

But it's hard for me to imagine the anti-globalization protesters themselves manufacturing the Heretic Pistol, leading me to think that some corporation out there sees some profit in creating and selling guns to a bunch of anti-corporate radicals. "The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them."

[Asgarus]

Uhm, shouldn't those protesters rather use whatever weapon they can get?
I mean, if they are fighting against giant international corporations, they surely have difficulties maintaining their own factories just to build some pistols. It would be more cool and atmospheric (imo if those protesters had some selfmade weapons and stuff, parts or whole weapons from many different manufacturers.


edit: it's quite possible that there are religious fanatics in a cyberpunk world. And also anti-religious fanatics.
A cult of hardcore atheists, backed by rich people (so they can afford producing their own pistols, or get supplied with them), raiding churches and stuff.


edit: I just realized that this thread is quite old and inactive. Well, maybe Servant Corps reads it anyway

[Servant Corps]

Yeah, it would probably make more "logical sense" for the 'protestors' to use any weapon they can get their hands on. But when I was making my post, I was trying to indirectly promote the idea of anti-corporate "enemies" that was just as influential, corrupt and immoral as the people they're fighting against.

Hardcore atheism might also be interesting as a faction trait. When CyberRogue was actively developed though, all factions would be randomly generated, so nobody could speculate what factions exist in any given playthrough. Still, having unique traits would be helpful (atheists having higher R&D spending, for example).

[Retropunch]

Interesting ideas and certainly things to think about. Cyberrogue hasn't disappeared completely - it's just currently on the backburner whilst I tackle some more manageable projects. I'm currently a long way into developing a Homeworld/FTL type game called 'A Scream in Space' which has a topic on the Creative Projects board.

My thought was that in a cyberpunk world, modifications and manufacturing would be much easier than today. If you think about things like 3D printers that we have now, and then take those forward 30 years and take off some of the regulation then you can imagine that it'd be much easier to build or modify weapons to suit your needs/aesthetics.

[Antsan]

As far as obfuscated/fuzzy history I think that's a great idea. I always think that games shy away from being an 'unreliable narrator' and it'd be nice to have localized/unreliable knowledge. I'm unsure how to do it in a natural way, but I'll have a think about it.

To the "localized" aspect: I don't know how modular the memory of chatbots is. If you could take out a chunk and replace it with another one, it might be possible to switch out parts of the chatbot depending on where you are, which faction/company the person you are talking to belongs to and stuff like that. I guess topics concerning special knowledge would be prime candidates for this kind of thing.

That post I am answering to is quite old, so I don't know whether this is of interest anymore even if it is feasible.

[High tyrol]

ptw