Thanks so much to everyone who's backed 868-BACK! We did it!
I'm going to rest, take a little break, and get back to you in the new year. I still have a lot of work ahead. B...
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Michael Brough
3 days ago
Q&A
Hey hey! Just one day to go on this, and we reached €30k yesterday. Thanks everyone, we're celebrating! I'm going to take a really good rest over the holiday break (as much a...
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Michael Brough
4 days ago
streaming now!
it's over, recording at: https://youtu.be/9OqsOy4IDFI
this was my first time ever doing a livestream! so there are some things i can do better but, i think it was nice.
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Michael Brough
5 days ago
868-HACK on sale, streaming 868-BACK tonight
Hey all,
We're into the last few days of this, and it's 97% of the way to €30,000! Thanks a lot to everyone who's backed. It's going to be worth it!
I've put the original 86...
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Michael Brough
12 days ago
Relic Tomes! a glimpse of notebooks
Hey, I dug up one of my old notebooks and found the scribbled pages that eventually became 868-HACK, so here (backer-exclusive) are those pages, plus my first page of notes f...
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Michael Brough
14 days ago
Roguelike Radio interview
Roguelike Radio interviewed me about the new game!
They're a lovely bunch of people and we had a nice chat about the original, my development process, some aspects of the de...
Thanks so much to everyone who's backed 868-BACK! We did it!
I'm going to rest, take a little break, and get back to you in the new year. I still have a lot of work ahead. But - I can do it now! I can afford to finish this game and do a really good job on it, thanks to you all. I'm really looking forward to when you'll all be able to play it!
Hey hey! Just one day to go on this, and we reached €30k yesterday. Thanks everyone, we're celebrating! I'm going to take a really good rest over the holiday break (as much as the kids will let me) and then get to work with confidence that I definitely have time to explore the systems to the depth they need.
More still helps of course - both for the game (see my update on stretch goals) and for us personally, as we're still recovering financially from my long illness! And yes this is your chance to preorder, the game is going to be great and you will not be disappointed. Get on it!
I did some Q&A in the livestream I did a couple of nights ago - some important questions like "what's new - is it basically just more progs?" (no! it's a huge new game built on the foundation of the old one, with rich mechanical additions, a bigger world, and an adventure!). I thought about doing another stream today just to answer more questions you might have, but it's all been a lot and I don't think I have enough energy for streaming.
So let's do it here! Post questions in the comments and I'll answer how many I can - I'll pace myself and just check in throughout the day when I can! Ask your questions, back the game if you haven't / bask in my gratitude if you have, and have a great Christmas and new year!
Hey! Someone asked for a clarification on my "stretch goals", because I haven't given a lot of detail on how the game would be different if I had more resources to work with. Most crowdfunding campaigns write something like:
if we reach $11111 i will let you pet the dog
if we reach $22222 also cat
$33333 goat
if we reach $44444 you get more experience points! you will level up faster and have more fun!
I hate this because it's all fake. You don't know in advance how many iterations an idea will take, you don't know if an idea will even work out until you've mostly implemented it. It's just not how designs go. At least, it's not how I make games - I grow them organically, using what resources I have available, trying ideas and adding them if they make it better, scaling things down if I have to, and taking out what doesn't end up fitting.
Honestly I think lots of games are much worse than they could have been because they commit to this kind of budgeting beforehand. Especially if they're publisher-funded; the small-minded conservative risk-averse fools in charge of making investment decisions want everything planned and scheduled in advance so their ass is covered. They care more about avoiding looking bad than whether what gets made is any good, and so they insist on all these processes that end up preventing lots of good work being made. This is one of the reasons crowdfunding is a better fit for me - you, the backer, can look at the end results of my work and decide just based on whether you like what I make! You don't have to justify to your boss if it looks a bit weird in the middle!
That said, you want to know the kind of stuff I have planned. None of this is binary in the sense that a certain number will let me do it or not, it's things that might scale up or down depending on how many months I have to work in, and what I have left over to pay collaborators.
DAILY MODE
Lots of people asked for a daily mode in 868-HACK. I thought I had a good reason why it wouldn’t work well, but looking back, I was overly attached to my clever solution to a problem that didn’t necessarily need to be solved. Regardless, for the new game I’m pretty sure I can make a good daily mode! But - obviously it takes time to implement and test.
CHALLENGE MODE
I'm inspired by the Cursed modes in Slice & Dice (and especially by talking about them with Doug on the eggplant show) to think about how far the complexity can be pushed, in terms of escalating the difficulty modifiers to absurd levels while also powering up the player to deal with them. I'd like to explore that here for an alternate challenge mode, but it will take at least a few weeks of experimentation to see if there's a good version here, and then if it works out (which it might not) a few more weeks to polish it. So this potentially costs a few thousand extra!
Other ideas I haven’t thought of yet will come up along the way, and the more funding I have the more free I’ll be to explore them when they do.
COMPLEXITY OF DYNAMIC MUSIC LAYERING
Most of my games feature some kind of dynamic music, responding in some way to the game action (e.g. getting more intense during fights). We’re planning to take this to the highest level I've done yet, now that Tara’s collaborating on the music. How deep we go into this, with how many layers and how detailed the reponses to game events, is going to just depend on how much time we can afford to spend on it - it's not a fixed target but just a flexible area where more resources can keep making a better experience. I really want to do a great job of this - the soundtrack is a critical part of cyberpunk vibes.
COLLABORATION ON VISUAL ART
As it stands I'm working on the game graphics by myself, but there are some scenes I want to include to really situate you in the world of the game, to evoke a stronger sense of environment and presence. I don't currently have the skills to pull this off. Either I have to spend time skilling up, or work with a visual art specialist to bring them to life. At the current level of funding we'll be able to get together a cool intro screen and ending screen, but I'd like to have a few more for special events in the game. Again this is not a $number, but a flexible possibility space where I'll do the best I can with whatever resources are available.
PORTING TO VARIOUS PLATFORMS
I've already released a game on Windows, MacOS, Linux, iOS and Android with Godot engine, so I'm confident in all of these. Though - with the variety of different devices and resolutions these days I wouldn't expect to catch all issues without extra costs. People have asked about things like Steamdeck, Switch and other consoles and.. I have literally zero experience with these! I would have to get hold of the equipment, play with it enough to have a good feel for it, do whatever it takes to port the game to them (for consoles, this means paying someone who specialises in that), spend time making sure the game feels right.. this is one of the areas that adds a lot to a game's budget - add say €5k for Steamdeck and at least €15k for any console. Yeah, it's a lot, and I'm probably even underestimating here.
So, I hope that clarifies my stretch goals. Thanks again to everyone who's backed, and if you're on the fence then maybe now is your time!
Hey, last time I talked a bit about the server network map, where you'll choose between different challenges to get different devices (and other gains). Today I'll tell you a bit about how these devices work. Again: this could be considered spoiler territory, so stop reading if you'd prefer.
(Also: we're still hoping to reach my estimate for a "comfortable" budget - i.e. definitely having time and resources to get everything done how I want it. So sharing this still helps!)
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As in 868-HACK, it's easy to complete a round (hack one server), and the challenges come from scoring points as you go or from completing multiple rounds with added difficulty mods. (I should note: sometimes when I talk about this people disagree with my claim that it's easy! If this is you, I recommend avoiding collecting any points at all until you've reached the end with 0 - getting all the points is probably impossible and you won't know how to judge the risks without a baseline. But for the sequel I'll be building a new introduction to help get the concepts across.)
I realised that if you have to finish hacking a server to get a device, then you never get to actually use the device from the final server, which feels kind of wrong: you've won the game but now it's over so your loot is worthless. So instead I moved it to the start of a round — the loot comes before the dungeon! Conveniently this also means that you get to play with shiny new stuff already in the first server you hack. Explained via mspaint: This is kind of a basic point but it probably has some general applicability in other designs so I have belaboured it.
So straight away devices are adding more variety between plays — an opening with /exorcism feels very different to /menu. And if you're successfully hacking multiple servers, eventually you have lots of them! What do you do with them? First off, they're not all switched on all the time: you have to make (increasingly complex) choices about which ones to activate in any given round. But when you can get them plugged in, they can make powerful combos!
I'll go through some examples; they're still changing a lot as I work on the game so no guarantees which of these will actually make it in but it will give you some kind of a picture:
Hey all, We're into the last few days of this, and it's 97% of the way to €30,000! Thanks a lot to everyone who's backed. It's going to be worth it!
I've put the original 868-HACK on sale, probably if you're here you already have it but maybe tell your friends: iOS appstore or Steam.
Also, tonight I'm planning to stream for a bit, from around 8:30pm GMT, to show some of the game and maybe answer any questions people have. This is my first time livestreaming! Usually I don't show very much of a game I'm working on at this stage because there's so much basic usability stuff left to do, but I'm feeling like there are probably some folk who'd like to see a bit more to help decide about backing the game, and maybe this will be a good format for that because I can explain what direction things are going in as I show it.
