Little preview on Chapter 2's new point and click view

So been a bit longer than I would have liked but finally able to get a proper news update for you guys. To be clear it has been a very rough few months and I wanted to go into a bit of detail on two major things that happened over this time period before going into detail on what's happening with Cyber Rift. So this both a status update for my IRL happenings and the game overall.

If you just want to find out news about Cyber Rift just skip closer to the bottom.

I miss him every single day. He was a damn good dog

The first being my dog unfortunately contracted an osteosarcoma (bone cancer) tumour on his skull. This was just about the absolute worst news I've received in years, and my family had been doing everything possible just to try and get him treatment. The tumour appeared out of nowhere and within two weeks it was clear that his days were numbered. Diagnosis was only about 4 weeks to live without radiation, and it felt like a race against time just to try and give him a little bit more time. It was an incredibly painful thing to witness, and I even called every vet in another province just trying to get radiation to stop progression of the tumour. Unfortunately we had to put him down after his brain function became incredibly impaired to the point where he was walking in circles not feeling half of his body, and he even just completely stopped eating food in general. He had a peaceful passing and was with family, but it was a very tragic and miserable experience to go through which was unfortunately a big reason why I didn't update the pages on game status for a while.

Gotta love builders cheaping out on the most important piece of a house!!! :)))))))))

The second was a bit less morbid but all the more time consuming: my house flooded! Yeah due to the wonders of fluid dynamics and poor building quality the main water feed to the house had a pipe slip out, and blast water over my entire first floor (including my entire office). Luckily I was awake at 4am in the morning because if I hadn't been pretty much every major electronic that I owned would have been obliterated by the water submerging it. Ended up losing some of my hardware (mainly my VR headset :( ), and currently working through insurance to get some of it compensated. But I've pretty much lost my office till I move at the end of next month. Not an ideal situation by any means but I'm still alive and going to be doing my damndest on my new kitchen table setup to get back to coding.

The developer view on the new dialogue tool I'm developing with my friend. It'll be extremely useful but still a lot of work to complete.

Now for the real meat and potatoes: what's going on with Cyber Rift? So to answer that I wanted to go into detail on some realizations and major changes in engine that have both been both wonderful and exhausting to deal with. Essentially I realized that I wanted to improve the way dialogue is done throughout the game, which initially doesn't sound like that major an endeavour. But due to this I realized that the way dialogue is currently displayed has a lot left to be desired. So in order to improve the overall experience I've been working with a friend of mine to create a brand new dialogue system to allow for some major quality of life features as well as add support for localization.

To list some of them:

- Ability to control text speed

- Ability to progress dialogue with spacebar (might add support for additional keys as well)

- Ability to read previous dialogue through a log feature

- Ability to hide dialogue text box

- Ability to hide dialogue text box AND dialogue text

- Ability to reverse dialogue actions (this is still unstable but something I'm really trying to get working)

- Localization support for alternative languages

Now that this all sounds great so what's the hold up? So the reason this has been a major endeavour is every single piece of dialogue in the entire game has to be changed to this new system. There are about 100 pages worth of dialogue throughout the game in a variety of awkward places (like clicking an object, or clicking that same object with DD-9) so this has required a major rework. One other big aspect of this is that the actual progression of the game and remembering what the player did was fundamentally flawed. There have been many moments that players have had issues with objectives not triggering and not being able to experience the game properly. Since dialogue had to get fixed anyways it was time to get two birds stoned at once. So overall it's a double major rework on both progression and game dialogue.

Here's a preview of the new motel background in Chapter 2.

And one more major thing I wanted to discuss was the progress on Chapter 2. Luckily since the art was a completely separate endeavour in terms of content the update has been progressing at a very steady rate. We're at about 5/8 backgrounds completed, and once those are finished they'll be joined by the 4 CG NSFW scenes we'll be adding with the update. Chapter 2 is going to be for the main Steam release of the game, and I'll be detailing on how that release will go when it is ready. Everything I've listed here in terms of game rework and content for the main game before Chapter 2 will be released in both the demo and Itch/Patreon/SubscribeStar versions of the game so don't worry on missing out on these new quality of life features.

Still a ways to go but wanted to give a more comprehensive update on how things were progressing. I really apologize for leaving you guys in the dark, but just life finds a way to be a real pain in the ass at times. I'll be making an effort to really go full Steam ahead and just push on to try and get things done at a faster rate. But to leave on a positive note: here's a cropped version of the new Steam banner! (this will also be a part of the Itch page when it's fully ready as well).

Really excited to show off the full banner soon but need to get a bit further development wise!