Cyber Knights: Flashpoint News

A day late and a dollar short might get you shot below the streets of the New Boston Zone but we’re hoping it doesn't come to that :D We’ve wrapped up our August sprints and are rallying to charge into September. The game’s development is cranking along daily and we’re still on pace for our Q4 release deadline for the Kickstarter alpha crew.
For this month’s update, we’ll highlight 3 big areas we’ve improved and share a cut of the latest Executive Producers meeting video.

[h2]Progress Highlights[/h2]
This month we’ve hit an exciting tipping point on the visual display for character cybernetic accessories and display. It took some final updates to our shaders, new blend shapes, a new texture mask and some cool new 3D models for certain pieces, but things are starting to look very augmented around here.

Throughout August, we’ve also been refining job trees and what kind of Talent bonuses they can provide. We’ve completed another design pass to clearly delineate what bonuses are granted by job trees, backstories, and attributes versus those which are granted by cyberware, gear and (on the field of battle) Talents. The following extra additions have also helped us carve out even more exciting and unique space for each of your merc’s Job types and further amped the appeal of cross-Jobbing.

1. We've added new Passive Talent types such as a hook when a character gets missed by an attack (Passive OnMissed), a hook when you get Downed in battle (down but not dead, Passive OnDowned) and a hook if your armor suffers a cracking hit (Passive OnArmorCrit) are all rounding out the Passive Talent category
   
2. We've enabled Passive Talents to do more than just give bonuses, they’re able to react and initiate a free reload, for example.
   
3. We've added more Talent rules and special clauses, such as a Sniper’s Take Position Talent which will stay active for 3 Turns unless the Sniper moves (and therefore, leaves the position) or a Cyber Knight's Quantum Assault which can only target and affect drones.
   

In a similar vein, we’ve been reviewing and tuning the game’s weapon variety, working hard to ensure every weapon class stands alone and offers unique strategic advantages and drawbacks when used -- optimal range bands, unique takes on Action Point economy, variation of firing modes like full auto and more. On top of that, we've rolled in some of the needed special rules -- Railguns now cut through enemy cover up to 10% while mercs carrying Pistols and SMG are allowed to fire these light weapons even if they lack the full AP cost of their entire attack. Powerful energy weapons -- like plasma rifles -- that bring a limited number of shots to the battle and can never be reloaded also add a major dose of spice to the weapon options.


[h2]Executive Producers #8[/h2]
We held Executive Producers #8 at the end of August. This was a particularly exciting one where we focused on the unique aspects of Cyber Knights: Flashpoint’s tactical combat. Then, we demoed the concepts in action on an alpha mission. However, that footage is for Executive Producer eyes only (per their Kickstarter reward), so we’ve included a redacted excerpt of the session and slide deck where we talk about the pillars of our inspirational games (XCOM-likes) and how we've gone beyond them.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[h2]Reward and Stretch Goal Progress[/h2]
With each update, we always include the progress bar infographic. If you have any questions about rewards or stretch goals, check out the graphic or reach out to us. With this update, there are no changes to the progress bar as we are getting down to only a few final milestones before the next big thing -- alpha late this year.

We are still delivering 3D faces -- some of those remaining are dependent on specific cyberware, accessories or beards to be completed before we can send them out. Thank you for your patience on these, they are coming.

We’re running a week late on our July update because our team has been in the middle of the cross-country moves we discussed earlier this year. Everyone is excited to get settled into the new digs and get back up to full speed. The game is looking better by the day, and soon we’ll have these time consuming but necessary hurdles cleared and we will be all hands on deck from here to the alpha in Q4 of this year.

It’s Cory’s moving day, the day the server came down!

July has been busy! Aside from the personal projects of big moves, we’ve made a ton of content across the game. There are so many “irons in the fire” it would be overkill to include them all here. Thankfully, we’re continuing to use and refine the process we’ve used to create 8 games before this, so we know these deep waters -- we’ve swum out more than a few times before.

In engine render, custom scene

Development is continuing at a good pace and we are still set for our Q4 date to release the alpha to the Kickstarter crew. For July’s progress update, we’re going to touch on 3 cool things specifically --

This month, Wounds suddenly grew fangs, claws and got nasty. You can take a Wound by suffering critical hits on the battlefield or getting Downed (reaching 0 HP). If you do drag your injured friend back to the safehouse instead of leaving them, a Wounded merc will need a variable amount of time in a medical clinic -- if the Wound can be healed at all. Those Wounds that can’t be healed have caused such irreparable trauma that only a full cybernetic replacement will suffice. In return, many types of cybernetics will prevent a Wound in the first place -- if a Faulty Heart is rolled on the Wound Tables and that part of you is already chrome, the Wound never takes.



We’ve wrapped up our pre-alpha UI kit that includes all the core interactive elements of the game. It isn’t the final visual style that will be in the game but it is clean and easy to use and is letting us build out the many complicated screens needed to make this game tick!



Another major improvement we’ve made in the last month is to dig back into the story metadata being authored throughout to ensure they help both new and veteran players alike. We’ve now added tagging that identifies dialog choices as positive/accept, negative/deny, delaying options and a neutral color for dialog options that aren’t concluding choices at all, just as conversational or flavor chatter. For new players, this will provide a needed level of clarity and for veteran replayers, this provides speed of play.
In addition, while we added a Skip Dialog option early, we’ve now wired up the metadata to offer a TL;DR button, which skips as much of the entire interaction as possible up to the first required choice.



[h2]Get your cyberpunk fix on our social accounts![/h2]
In addition to our @TreseBrothers twitter where we chat game dev and share highlights from all our games, you can get specific Cyber Knights updates and sneak peaks on its Facebook and twitter account.

Plug in to keep updated and get your regular cyberpunk fix. We’re sharing concept art, gameplay previews, news & interviews, highlights from the forums & discord, shout-outs to other awesome cyberpunk creators, and more. See you on the net, Knight!

[h2]Executive Producers #8[/h2]
We’ve got the 8th Executive Producers meeting scheduled now on the books for mid August. From now until the alpha release, we are working to schedule monthly meetings with the Executive Producers. It’s a great team and we want to keep them close to the ongoing development to facilitate detailed feedback on our design decisions. We will include an excerpt of the meeting in the next Kickstarter update.

[h2]Reward and Stretch Goal Progress[/h2]
With each update, we always include the progress bar infographic. If you have any questions about rewards or stretch goals, check out the graphic or reach out to us. With this update, there are no changes to the progress bar as we are getting down to only a few final milestones before the next big thing -- alpha late this year.

Still blaming the beards!

We are still delivering 3D faces, and have now delivered more than 70% of them. Thank you for your patience on these, they are coming.

We’ve got your June progress update here, slipping into the last few hours of the month. It's too hot to type so much, so we’re going to keep this month's update on the shorter side and only highlight a few of the major exciting things outside of our Kickstarter. Let’s start there --

[h2]Save 50% on Steam Summer Sale[/h2]
Steam always holds the biggest sale of the year right at the start of summer. If you haven’t picked up all of our other games yet, now might just the time to check them out as everything is 50% down. You’ll see the shades of the inspiration for Cyber Knights: Flashpoint written all over these games.

Sail the stars and command your ship and crew from your bridge in Star Traders: Frontiers --
https://store.steampowered.com/app/335620/Star_Traders_Frontiers

Or lead an assault squad of mech pilots against xeno threats and more in Templar Battleforce --
https://store.steampowered.com/app/370020/Templar_Battleforce

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Credit to Volodymyr Shtohun (Shotgun), one of our environmental artists, for creating this amazing exploding swap of street building props! Check out his ArtStation page for more. Footage is not in-engine.


[h2]June Progress[/h2]
Another month game dev has hit milestones of progress across the board. The game’s content, systems and balance keep moving forward and feeling smoother by the day. Things are going well and we’re still set on our Q4 date to release the alpha to the Kickstarter crew.

For June’s progress update, we’re going to touch on 3 cool things specifically --


We’ve completed the automation and build tooling required to build and package playable versions of the game with a single click. This type of robust tooling will make the alpha possible but is also an investment for years to come as we continually update and expand Cyber Knights: Flashpoint. Notably, this automation also includes the ability to cut specific versions of the games for different specialist partners like our SFX team.

Which is exciting news in and of itself! Our SFX team at Studio Viking have started wiring up the game’s sound and it is obvious from the start that we are going to have far and away the best SFX and fullest soundstage of any game we’ve ever produced.

7 material clusters, over 30 blendshapes, thousands of combinations

Also, while it feels amazingly late in the process, we’ve finally finalized the design for characters’ heads with every bell, whistle and texturing gizmo we could think of. Let’s say, we’re planning for the long term here! The diagram above shows how the head is split out into 7 texturing areas (not shown, Ears). This technical detail is going to afford us a lot of freedom in head styling -- everything from closed shaved haircuts to facial hair to facial cyberware and more. On top of that, every head comes with over 30 blendshapes which allow for different types of modification to the structure of the face -- everything from widening the chin to making the lips fuller or thinner -- to emotional cues such as cracking a smile, raising an eyebrow or looking sneakily to the left (it’s always the left).

[h2]Executive Producers #7[/h2]
We held the seventh Executive Producers meeting at the end of the month and crammed in a full hour plus of level design, decoration and lighting. We’ve included an excerpt here near the end of the meeting as we layered in some more props to fill in the nanofacturing facility. We love giving these behind-the-curtains hours to the Executive Producers and we hope you enjoy this clip --
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[h2]Reward and Stretch Goal Progress[/h2]
We’ve included the progress bar infographic as usual. If you have any questions about rewards or stretch goals, check out the graphic or reach out to us. With this update, there are no changes to the progress bar as we are getting down to only a few final milestones before the next big thing -- alpha late this year.



We are still delivering 3D faces, and have now delivered more than 50% of them. Beards slowed us down a lot! Thank you for your patience on these, they are coming.

Knights, Mercs,

We’re waving goodbye to May and welcoming June and so it is time for another monthly progress report. We’ve been in a ton of areas, including improvements in animation integration, level building and automation tooling to help our team develop content for the game faster.



[h2]May Progress[/h2]
During May we made substantial progress testing our over-map story and dialog system which is used to inject story events and mission chatter directly into the game map. This required some new loading and asset management code, to ensure that both characters on the map and characters off the map (like your team’s Face and Contacts) were still able to appear correctly.

Another feature that saw significant improvement during May is the snap to cover movement mechanic. While Cyber Knights: Flashpoint is tileless, we’ve found in testing that a snap-to-cover mechanic is a necessary one to ensure player’s expectations are met in regards to taking cover and controlling sight lines. When combined with raycast based line of sight detection and feedback about targets, snap-to-cover gives us a best of both worlds hybrid with the benefits of tiles where players would use them, and with the freedom of tileless where players would want it.

Our animation team is completing an overhaul of the weapon’s targeting suite during May to allow characters to raise or lower their weapons up to 45 degrees when selecting high or low targets. Using reference frames and additive animation techniques, the engine can dynamically slide across the scale between straight out aiming to high or low or anywhere in between.



As our first set of playable levels comes together, we’re working hard to make sure they’re as beautiful as they are playable. We’ve just completed our first four ambient-only lighting setups which will act as the baseline lighting for different levels and thematic feelings established. Unity provides a rich set of tools for both lighting and color grading and we’re experimenting with different tools to apply LUT and color correction in both cut-scenes and gameplay.

Let's call them, Sea green, Day Blue, Dark Night and Radioactive Haze

May also included some heavy lifting on our shader implementation which is a critical pre-alpha task. Finalized physically based rendering (PBR) shaders that are both performant and beautiful and still support our feature requirements are necessary for all the Cyber Knights: Flashpoint platforms to live together. We’re experimenting with replacing our custom, hand-built shaders with more flexible ones created in Amplify Shader Editor which might give us more flexibility as we approach the wide variety of platforms and hardware in our target set.

the Amplify Shader Editor

Our team has grown substantially for Cyber Knights: Flashpoint, but the core machinery of the studio is still the two of us, Andrew and Cory. We don’t really plan to change that for Cyber Knights: Flashpoint, and so we continue to put a major focus on automation wherever possible. In May, one area that got some serious attention was the Level Builder’s light probe placement and alignment system. The levels and environments you’ve previously seen us demonstrate and show off to Executive Producers and Twitch streams have all used manually placed probes, which we’ve found takes a lot of time to create and maintain. Recognizing that we will need MANY levels for Cyber Knights: Flashpoint to live up to our ambition, we’ve created a new light probe automation layer that will save many hours and deliver a level of fidelity in probe placement that would be challenging to achieve consistently by hand.

Each dot in the screenshot is a light probe -- I think we want to automate this one :D


If you aren’t watching Twitch but are still looking to keep a finger close to the pulse, join us on our official Discord server or follow @CyberKnightsRPG on Twitter.


[h2]Executive Producers #6[/h2]
In early May, we met for the 6th Executive Producer summit to take a behind-the-scenes look at Cyber Knight’s level builder and our process for building levels which we’ve honed throughout our entire gamedev career, as far back as Cyber Knights classic, Heroes of Steel and Templar Battleforce.
We’ve included a 5 minute excerpt from this Executive Producers session which ran over an hour in length. In the clip, we discuss how the heist “Missions” are assembled from smaller content chunks called “Levels” and the wide variety of Level types we are designing and building out for the game. If you’re eager to learn more about how we’re building the game, this one's for you! Enjoy.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[h2]Reward and Stretch Goal Progress[/h2]
As always, we include the infographic of our progress to ensure it is clear where all of our commitments on stretch goals and rewards stand. With this update, there are no changes to the progress bar as we are getting down to only a few final milestones before the next big thing -- alpha late this year.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Also, we are hammering away still at delivering 3D faces. We have cleared a few technical hurdles related to beards specifically which had stopped delivery for a bit and so things are moving again. If you haven’t received your email yet, blame your beard? Lol, honestly -- we thank you for your patience. We’ve been putting extra effort into getting them perfect, so each one now takes about an hour of work to set up, record and deliver to the backer.

In-engine render, custom scene

With April coming to a close and spring officially in full swing, we’re here with another monthly Cyber Knights: Flashpoint update. Just like today, Much like modern times, spring means extra rain in the 23rd century but it's a much more dangerous prospect under skies brewing with nano fallout. Especially for those living outside of the dome in the Wards --

In a joint venture between McKellen Heavy Industries and Matsumoto Global started 11 years ago, major new exterior sections of land have been reclaimed for habitation. Each measures roughly 8 square miles and are situated to the west and north west of the city center. As nano pollution has been slowly dropping since 2203, these areas are now deemed habitable due to high walls, massive blower units that vault pollution overhead and low range ionized shielding. Even with these precautions, Ward 4 and 7 are deemed the worst available above-ground habitation in the zone and each is home to roughly 1.5 million hardy souls.

In April’s recap progress report, we’re sharing some of the major progress we’ve made this month on the march toward alpha, highlighting our recent Twitch dev streams and sharing some new texturing work for the Chromehawk Starting Weapons reward.

Also, while we haven't finished a fulll integration, the animations to pet each individual dog breeds are now done. You can’t actually initiate a pet in the game yet, but the animation is more than half the battle. Below is a low resolution clip of the animation in our animation review tool --
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

The cats do not seem impressed --
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[h2]April Progress[/h2]
Throughout April, we've stuck to our 4 focus weeks but we are completing more and more work at a broader level to improve the balance and cohesion of the content that will be in the alpha game. For example, we've been constantly tuning the exact balance and progression of the early game weapon's dealers and prices to make sure you can sink your teeth into upgrading your gear, have access to interesting options but don't have access too early to too much.

For our focus weeks in April, we've (1) completed a major rebalanced of the Talent set in the game to carve out space for special surge Talents -- are free to use, instant and powerful (but, like all Talents go on cooldown) -- which allow team members to have turns where their power level really surges (yep, exactly as it sounds), (2) improved the equipment and loadout system to better support saving, renaming, changing loadouts and even sharing equipment between loadouts on different characters (please wait your turn, only one at a time, you mercs!), (3) expanded the cyberware offering to support all 12 cybernetic slots (Skin, Spinal, Deep Brain Interface, Fast Brain Interface, Skeletal, Hands, Vision, Ocular, Heart, Lungs, Skull and Muscular) and upgraded cybernetic implants to allow them to grant their own unique surge Talents along with more constant buffs, and finally (4) dedicated a week to designing and improving our mission set as well as making needed improvements to the environment theme kits (industrial, street, skyrise, tech lab) to better support key tactics concepts like cover, stealth and line of sight (more metadata, varied physics raycasting for each).

In-engine render, custom scene

[h2]Weekly Twitch Dev Streams[/h2]
Both Cory and I are now active every week on the Trese Brothers Twitch channel showing off different angles of the game’s development. If you’re looking to keep a more active pulse on the game’s progress, stop by at 4 PM EST on Tuesday (Andrew) or Thursday (Cory) to check out what we are working on! Recently, I’ve been showcasing visual customization options in both characters and weapons while Cory was working on the cyberware design and implementation last week. If you can’t make the scheduled streams, you can always check the VOD afterwards on the channel.

Here are some of our recent videos to check out if you need to catch up:

• Sharing the process to create Kickstarter 3D face rewards
  
• Creating a scene showing Rio in action, our archetype Vanguard character (see at the top of this update)
  
• Working on cybernetics catalog for the game
  
• Most recently, attaching scopes, silencers and other mods to weapons

If you aren’t watching Twitch but are still looking to a close lock on our progress, join us on our official Discord server or follow @CyberKnightsRPG on Twitter.


[h2]Executive Producers #6[/h2]
Our sixth Executive Producers meeting is scheduled for next week in early May. From now until the alpha release, we are working to schedule monthly meetings with the Executive Producersto showcase our constant progress and ensure we are getting that stream of early, detailed feedback from our biggest backers. We will include an excerpt of the 6th meeting in our next Kickstarter update.


[h2]Reward and Stretch Goal Progress[/h2]
As always, we include the infographic of our progress to ensure it is clear where all of our commitments on stretch goals and rewards stand. With this update, the only change is that we have marked the Chromehawk Starting Weaponry reward as “In Progress” state, as the art team has returned to working on the stylish look and textures for these powerful starting weapons.
Also, we are still delivering 3D backer faces, so if you haven’t received your email yet, we thank you for your patience. We’ve been putting extra effort into getting them perfect, so each one now takes more than an hour to set up, record and deliver to the backer. They are coming!