Happy New Year!

Knights and Backers!

We are so excited to welcome 2021! It will be a very big year for the game as we march down the to-do list (stretch goals and rewards) towards the alpha with 1,000+ amazing backers. December ended on a busy note and as January opens, we are roaring into the new year of development!

[h2]Alpha Schedule Update[/h2]
As we arrive in 2021, it is time to revisit the alpha schedule. All of our internal scheduling models show that the Cyber Knights: Flashpoint alpha will not be ready during Q1 of 2021. We’re making good progress every day, but the game is big and we added a lot of scope to it through the campaign’s stretch goals.

This is always a hard decision. There are hundreds of factors at play. Without a doubt, 2020 has been a tough year. And, as we’ve learned from watching game launches over the years, and over the past few months, it is so critical to launch at the right time. It is up to Cory and I alone to make the decision as to when the alpha is ready. We are always very careful not to risk burning your trust or burning your time by releasing the game to alpha before it is ready and fun to play.

We are committed to continuous updates on Kickstarter -- one a month or more -- and to being as transparent as we can be about the schedule and our progress. We’re thankful for everyone’s patience in giving us time to get this right.

[h2]Adding and Trimming Scope[/h2]
When it comes to schedules and deadlines, scope is always a top concern. Getting the right level of depth in all the right systems is key to setting a foundation that will support an amazing game. Over the last few months we’ve both added some scope -- as our development exposes how exciting some of these areas can be -- and judiciously trimmed scope where it feels right.

Key to gridless movement system are simplified costs and a generous "grace" in the cost of movement

A good example of added scope is in pre-mission advantages, where we have found that this heist-style setup can be such a fun part of every mission. We quickly knew that pre-mission advantages needed even more capabilities (such as unlocking previously inaccessible areas in missions), more interactivity options with the maps (such as bribes to buy keys to certain doors) and that it also needed tighter integrations to the Matrix Mk2 expansion.

A good example of a scope trim is that we have fully separated the venn diagram of Contact services and safehouse offerings. The original design contained some overlap between Contact services and safehouse modules that impacted your safehouse build strategy, allowing you to rely on Contacts for some things and build your safehouse to cover the others. In practice, we found this to be too much to manage and it added confusion instead of depth. A key example of the separation is that your safehouse will no longer have a cyberware clinic or hospital ward -- these are services provided by Contacts only. Your team will heal slowly at the safehouse on their own and there is no option to invest in becoming a doctor’s office. What's more, you don't have to weigh the decision of becoming a doctor’s office against truly exciting things like a drone workshop or a weapon crafting workshop.

There is only one true color for loots!

[h2]January Progress[/h2]
As we march to alpha, we are dedicating each week to a specific area of the game -- finishing data modeling, adding new content, integrating more widely with other systems and pushing testing data through the game. In January, our weeks have been focused on (1) expanding the mission capabilities and allowing stories to fully create missions, (2) improving loot and mission objectives interactivity on the map and (3) Contact services, Traits and the tiered laddering of their offerings. Next up, we are revisiting pre-mission advantages again and pushing even more feature-awesome into their stack as they make up the bedrock of the heist RPG style. Then we’ll be heading back to the safehouse to support a new set of modules including drone workshops and kennels.



Even as we work through a cycle of focus weeks, we are continuing progress every week on some major systems that are still in construction. The biggest of these in the Matrix Mk2 prototype. As promised when we set it as a stretch goal, we are taking a simple system and expanding it into something full blown with an entire job specialty, its own branch of equipment, completely new enemy type (IC) and an AI system for them, special hacking focused cyberware, cyberdecks, matrix missions and more. We’re setting aside some hours each week to make progress on this big one.

A story diagram from the EP meeting showing the flow of an early storyline, codenamed “Sibling Salvage”

[h2]Executive Producers / Patreons[/h2]
Last weekend, we met with the Executive Producers for the 4th time. In this meeting, we discussed the story design theory we’re using to tackle the challenge combining deep, threaded narrative stories with a squad-based RPG where you have the freedom to create or recruit all of your characters. We shared our architecture and design decisions that helped us form the game’s data structures and design patterns that are allowing us to create very unique storylines in each playthrough, by engaging and progressing characters and contacts in stories from many different angles.

We’ve included a five minute excerpt from the introduction to the Executive Producers session where we outlined the goal we’ve set for the game’s story system. It doesn’t include the juiciest details we shared with the Executive Producers team, but we hope you’ll find it exciting to hear what kind of experience we’re aiming to achieve!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Next week on Thursday, we’ll be sitting down with the Patreon crew to go through the same story design presentation. Any patron at any pledge level is invited to join us for this last “Patrons Only” Executive Producers meeting which is a thank you to those supporters who pledge to our efforts every month.

[h2]Streaming on Twitch[/h2]
You can find Cory (and sometimes Andrew) on the Trese Brothers Twitch where we are streaming game development, answering questions and talking about the studio Tuesdays and Thursdays at 4PM EST.

[h2]Rewards and Stretch Goals[/h2]
As always, we include the progress bar infographic to ensure you can see the status of every reward and stretch goal in a single glance. Last update, we were excited to announce the last of the art stretch goals before alpha had been officially completed. With this update, we’re very close to closing out the major art reward for backer’s 3D faces in the game. Hopefully this week or next, the 3D renderings will be going out to our backers to check out!



Also, we’re continuing constant pressure on the Hacking Mk2 prototype, but there is still a lot of work to complete as discussed above in the January Progress section of the update.