Cyber Knights: Flashpoint News

Another month! The last quarter of the year always goes by in a flash. During November, we’ve had a special focus on wrapping up the UX design process, implementing lessons we’ve learned throughout the alpha process and adding new storyline content to the game.

There are always way too many dev milestones to list them all here, but let’s check in on a few!



[h2]UX Design Goes Safehouse[/h2]
The UX design phase is beginning to truly wind down as our implementation phase is rapidly ramping up. We have a huge amount of UI work to do to make the game as beautiful and flowy as the designs but it is going to be very worth it. Most recently, the UX design time has been focused on the Safehouse and here are some of the latest drafted wireframes (not the visual design, just design of elements, spacing, organization, flow -- that is, this is not intended to be beautiful at this stage).

Cleaning out your safehouse for expanded operation

Shopping and comparing weapons

It's just Business with Origami Joe, an underworld contact

Planning your next heist

A plan comes together - paying bribes, calling in favors, running legwork and more

[h2]New Storylines[/h2]
The game is growing daily and is a voracious beast for more content. Storylines, recruits, and new maps are coming online as fast as we can handle them. We’re very excited to be passing through some major milestones and assembling the most complicated story and heist content yet this month.
November saw the addition of a new “Deaddrop” storyline from your Gun Runner and if the month had another day or two left in it, November would also see the “Carnivore” storyline about a corrupt cop (the update is in final tweaks and testing now...). The “Undercutter” storyline can proc with a friendly Gun Runner who pitches you a hard to beat one-time deal to acquire a powerful E-Rifle weapon (more below).

These new storylines are also seeing your squad’s Face coming into their own as a powerful player in the strategy and story layer. The team's Face now appears prominently in your Roster, can access their Training and cannot multi-class. The Face is your team's negotiator, fixer and voice on the comms during missions. Their special skill tree is dedicated to the strategy layer and has no tactical abilities on it. In this new storyline, you'll have the option to use your Street-focused "Razor Bargain" ability to force the best deal even if it cuts a bit too deep. The new “Carnivore” storyline will introduce and see the first use of Milsec-focused “Hardliner” ability.

The old UI is functional but not great or pretty
[h2]E-Rifles and IO-Chargers[/h2]
One of the latest storylines added introduces the first chance to get your hands on an E-Rifle. This hi-tech class of weapons are mid-ranged armor melters with limited full auto capability (3 shots) and a penchant for Pure Damage and killing drones. However, E-Rifles have a limited number of reloads on a mission (all stages of the mission, not just one) so carrying one is a known trade-off and puts a lot of weight on your other weapon to work in more situations than not.

Tagging along with this new type of limited-ammo weapon, the new IO-Chargers went up for sale at your local Gun Runner which shakes up the item meta for Cyberswords and anyone planning to carry E-Rifles. The IO-Charger is a mobile battery unit capable of filling the current ammo bar of your weapon. For a blade with an IO-Batt, this completely recharges the blade and enables you to use another round of Talents which rely on these critical charges. For an E-Rifle or any other reload-limited weapon, the IO-Charger will refill the current ammo bar only. If you have 2/3 reloads for the E-Rifle, you can empty the first magazine and then reload it with IO-Charge to stay at 2/3 reloads.

For anyone carrying a blade (Cybersword or not!) or an E-Rifle, an IO-Charger is very likely to be a requirement in your limited item carry.


[h2]Alpha Lessons: Downed becomes Bleeding Out[/h2]
We’ve learned so much over the 11 months of the alpha and are constantly reapplying that learning back to systems, features and content in the game. In November we had time to come back to an important system - what happens when one of your characters takes a deadly hit. Previously in the Alpha, this would knock you into a “Downed” state that required healing before you could take action again (you could heal yourself). We heard a lot from the alpha player about the reasons this wasn’t fun and were excited to roll out the new Bleeding Out rules this month. If you take a hit that would potentially kill you (reaching 0 HP), you get a surge of HP (up to 30% of your total) but also a nasty debuff, naturally called Bleeding Out. As soon as you receive any healing, Bleeding Out is purged.

Bleeding Out costs you 20 HP a Turn and will kill you if you are not healed - it is only a matter of Turns. The debuff also slaps you with a -2 AP and -2 MP penalty but most importantly allows you to take any action or use any Talent. You can run, shoot, Overwatch or throw a grenade. Our mercs go down fighting, thank you very much. Fun!

But consider healing yourself quickly or calling an ally for help -- if you take another wound that brings you to 0 HP while you are Bleeding Out, you roll your Death Save and are likely to die (see your chosen Difficulty here).

[h2]Creative Surveys Deadline[/h2]
We have set a deadline for the completion of the creative reward surveys. We will be sending a private Kickstarter update next to be sure everyone sees this.

Throughout 2022, we have sent out Google Forms surveys to collect information for your Kickstarter rewards. Depending on your backer tier, you will have received naming surveys, recruitable character surveys, and/or Ally, Villain, and Heist surveys. If you have not received a survey, you believe you should have, please message us here, email [email protected] or reach out to Liviana on Discord so we can make sure you get them.

We want to do everything we can to make sure that your characters and stories are integrated into the main story beats of CKF as much as possible. To ensure this can occur, we will be closing all of these surveys at the end of the year 2022. If you have not yet filled them out, please do so before the end of the year. If you have any questions about how to fill out the surveys, did not receive your surveys via email, or need clarification on what we are looking for, please email [email protected] or contact Liviana on Discord.

This deadline does not include Encode Your Legend reward which has not yet been started and is slated for 2023.

[h2]Reward and Stretch Goal Progress[/h2]
For completeness, we include the progress bar infographic in each and every update. If you have any questions about rewards or stretch goals, check out the graphic or reach out to us. We’re continuing to work on Digital Artbook Assembly.

What a spooky month! We’ve been busy with 4 major Alpha updates to Steam and hit some major development and balancing milestones for the game. Throughout the month we’ve worked on a major rebalance to all of the game’s weaponry to help all the gunfighting options have enough character and exciting strategic differences, extending the game’s scaling and Power Level system so longer games are continually challenging, refined the stealth gameplay, added story and dialog to improve the context of the game start. Now at the end of the month, we’ve officially started the massive UX overhaul project.

There are always way too many dev milestones to list them all here, but let’s check in on a few!


[h2]UX Implementation Begins![/h2]
The UX project has been a real beast -- it officially started in July 2022 with study of reference games, before launching into an exploration phase that resulted in large-scale wireframing of every screen, hover and interaction in the game. Now the beautiful visual design is complete for 2/3 of the game and with the latest Alpha update, we’ve officially started rolling in the first changes including a custom cursor that highlights nicely over clickable map elements.

This will be a long road to the animated, beautiful vision outlined by the project but the stone has started rolling!


[h2]Major “Gunfight” Milestone[/h2]
After months of studying player feedback and reviewing all the combat rules and systems, we were excited to roll out a Major Milestone “GUNFIGHT” in mid-October to the Cyber Knight’s weapons system.

The goal of the design update was to further develop marked functional differences in weapon types which enable teams to push those weapons into niche roles based on the mods you install. We had been chipping away at this update through September but it was time to finish the rest in one big sweep. In this major update, we made major changes to the rules for:

• Accuracy, including adding Glancing Hits
  
• Full Auto, including ability to surge damage on single targets
  
• Well, pretty much all the weapon stats actually :D
  

With changes to the fundamental rules for Accuracy, Full Auto and major stat rebalances including ranges, shot volume, recoil rates, Armor Crit %, reload AP, it was an exciting moment for players to re-evaluate their load outs and see how the new system fit their play style. A lot more weapons are exciting and viable for a lot more reasons now and the field of smart tactical choices is much wider.



[h2]Controller Support[/h2]
With the alpha now running officially on Steam, we’ve been excited to be working with players across the spectrum of controllers on testing out the game -- XBox, Playstation, Steam Controller and the Steam Deck as well. With the help of the alpha community, we’ve already made some configuration tweaks on the Steam end and are preparing to improve the smoothness of our controller support throughout the game as part of the UX project.


[h2]Stealth, Auto-Duck, Projection[/h2]
Stealth is a key component of many heist team’s strategy and we’ve continued to refine and improve the stealth game throughout October.

Some big rule changes have been put in place, including a rule that states that Suspicious enemies (they’ve heard something but aren’t really aware there is an intruder) are still considered Surprised. It may sound small, but it’s a +25% Accuracy boost and enables weapons like Blades, Sniper Rifles and Pistols to use their Stealth Critical rules

We’re also working to phase out any need to manage your running / crouched state. This is a hassle and only really matters when you are moving, which is control you can exercise when setting and confirming a movement destination but not something you should ever need to otherwise worry about. To ensure that being crouched has no impact on combat or stealth, your team members will now automatically duck if an enemy is about to see them and being crouched would keep them hidden. With a hiss of something like "Head down!" they just drop out of sight. Ah, simplicity!

Finally, we’re catching up more and more to visual style and polish, so it was exciting to make the Vanguard’s Projection Talent look very cool.


[h2]Creative Surveys All Sent[/h2]
Last month, the final major creative survey went out to invite the Power Broker and Heist Edition backers to start their creation process for allies, villains and heists. This concludes the round of survey offerings for 2022, which have covered adding names to the game, Recruitable Characters, Buffed Recruitables, and now the Power Broker and Heist. The final major survey will be for Encode Your Legend in early 2023.

All of these will be on-going projects as our team sorts through the raw creative input, reaches out if we have questions and then imprints those ideas into the game for all to enjoy.

If you haven’t received a survey email but should have, please reach out to us here or email [email protected]

[h2]Reward and Stretch Goal Progress[/h2]
For completeness, we include the progress bar infographic in each and every update. If you have any questions about rewards or stretch goals, check out the graphic or reach out to us. This month, we’ve started working on the Digital Artbook as we have finally gathered all of the concept art and 3D renders needed to assemble the final product. We can’t wait to share that one with all of you!

Another month and another major set of features and content milestones have been completed! During September, we released 3 major alpha updates packed full of features, improvements from community feedback and content. Two of the major systems that we wrapped up this month are close to our hearts: difficulty and Trait mutation. Both have drawn a lot of inspiration and lessons learned from our last game, Star Traders: Frontiers. In addition, the UX team has completed the visual design for the both the main mission screens as well as the Matrix Mk2.

As always, there are far too many dev milestones to list them all here, but let’s check in on a few!

[h2]UX Redesign[/h2]
For a long time, Cyber Knights: Flashpoint has been living with a functional, if not beautiful, game UI. Working with our UX team, we’ve now completed the discovery, wireframe design and finally the visual design for the main tactical modes of the game -- the real-life heist missions as well as the Matrix Mk2 hacking you can engage in during a heist.

We still have the challenging task of bringing the full UI design into the game, but all the assets are ready, and we’re prepared to start this week while the UX team is moving on to a very exciting discovery and wireframing process for the Safehouse.

Starting with wireframes for rapid design and iteration --
^^ Wireframe of main map + character status

^^Wireframe of hacking the Matrix Mk2

We progressed to the final visual design --
^^ Visual design of main map + character status

^^ Visual design of hacking the Matrix Mk2

And then into animations --


^^Which will especially helpful to bring the overlord Security AI "to life" as an adversary --

[h2]Difficulty System[/h2]
We take difficulty systems very seriously in all of our games! During September, we carved out 6 difficulties, each one slowly ratcheting up the challenge curve across all aspects of the game. The final needed addition which is planned to be added during the Steam Early Access period is our classic Custom Difficulty setting to allow you to fine tune difficulty with extreme precision -- just like you could in CK classic with famous difficulty settings like Live Fast, Die Young (LFDY) that maxed out starting credits and enemy difficulty.

This is an area where we’ve listened closely to our Star Traders: Frontiers players over the years and we’ve made difficulty aspects even more nuanced than ever before. We’ve also added the #1 most highly requested difficulty feature from STF which is to enable slowing down or speeding up of the game’s story. This will allow players who want to take more time and explore more angles of the game without feeling a time crunch to play at a more relaxed pace and also let those who love the pressure of the tick-tick-tock-tick of a very short clock to prove they can play the game with a icy calm no one else can handle.

Difficulty settings can adjust a very wide range of game aspects including mission XP and monetary rewards, the cost of all types of goods and services, the speed of the story, your character’s base resistance to Trait mutations, Wounds, Armor Shredding and Death as well as increasing the enemy’s scaled Power Level, Matrix Power Level, enemy hitpoint pools and more. Between the 6 difficulty levels (Casual, Easy, Normal, Hard, Brutal, Chrome) and the to-be-added Custom Difficulty, you’ll be able to tune your play to your own style.

[h2]Trait Progression[/h2]
We rolled out the Trait mutation system which is an evolution of the system we built for Star Traders: Frontiers but with a strong focus on delivering a compelling experience for a smaller squad. Throughout their career, your character's Traits come from their backstory, events in their life, battle wounds and from choices they make in their stories.

As your merc’s career progresses, events and story choices - surviving a mission, taking heavy wounds in combat, seeing a friend die in battle, succeeding at Legwork, maxing out your cyber, etc - will build up negative and positive points in two separate pools. When either of these pools grow large, they can cause Trait mutations which can either weaken or strengthen a positive or negative Trait. Different aspects of your base building choices at your Safehouse, choices you make in stories and medical care you’re willing to pay for can help manage these swings.

This system allows Traits to have varying impact on your character, change and mutate throughout your character’s careers as events take turns for the better or worse and still honor the Traits that make them who they are and carefully manage the number of Traits they have so there is room to add more at the right pivotal moments.


[h2]Power-Broker & Heist Surveys[/h2]
We’re excited to announce that the surveys to gather the first round of input for the top tier rewards - Power Broker and Heist Edition - have been sent out to backers. Cory and I are personally reviewing every incoming response and it's clear already that these big rewards are going to lead to some extremely fun co-creative endeavors with our backers as we fill New Boston up with wild, eccentric and dangerous characters.

If you haven’t received a survey email but should have, please reach out to us here or email [email protected]

[h2]Reward and Stretch Goal Progress[/h2]
For completeness, we include the progress bar infographic in each and every update. If you have any questions about rewards or stretch goals, check out the graphic or reach out to us. With this month’s update, we’ve sent out the surveys for Power Broker and Heist Editions and so those two reward categories have moved into in-progress status.

The leaves are getting crispy here as August has already come to a close. This month was a big one! We migrated the alpha to Steam and posted two massive updates with piles of new content and features. The UX team is wrapping up the visual design for the main mission screens while 1-2 new levels are coming through the level design production pipeline every week. Everything is moving along at a very steady clip and the entire team is heads down on loading up the game with exciting content and new progression of play.

There are far too many dev milestones to list them here in a single update -- but let’s hit a few high points!

[h2]Progression, Enemy Variety, and Alpha Playtest Missions[/h2]
Throughout the month of August, we’ve been hard at work building out content sets to help establish the game’s progression beyond the first few upgrades and levels. In August, this included doubling the maximum length of a single game from 50 to 100 days, raising the maximum character level to 14, adding multiple levels of armor to be purchased from Contacts and adding a new storyline to introduce the concept of Legwork.


Legwork is a story system that represents any type of challenge, assignment or task that isn’t part of a tactical heist. Derived from tabletop RPGs, legwork could be the type of work you do before a heist such as casing the joint, following a target, forging some IDs or afterwards, like finding a fence or sinking something you need hidden to the bottom of the New Boston harbor. Legwork always takes some time and your mercs qualify for different types of Legwork based on their backstories, traits and tags -- making who you know, where you’ve come from and what soft skills you have very important. For example, a merc with a history in the Fenian gang, who crewed an Atlantic cargo ship or who did a stint working at the dockyard might know where to sink that precious package under the harbor’s black water. Legwork is a key glue we’ll be using to hold the storylines together, to build relationships with Contacts and to bring the city to life.

The next step for progression was to add a big dose of variety to the enemy spawn system and allow for more exciting squads of enemies to spawn. These new squads are custom designed to present a coherent type of challenge on the battlefield and often feature a captain along with different types of enemies who work well together. Their specialized roles will be even more clear as all enemies are now using Talents beyond Overwatch, including buffs, debuffs, (occasionally) heals and laying down their own types of covering fire.

The 1st of 4 playtest levels so far: “Big Door”

In order to get faster feedback on new levels being designed for the game, we’ve added the Mission Playtest program, which gives alpha players the option to play a (rapidly growing) number of missions disconnected from their larger story or heist context. These playtest missions are rough cuts with basic lighting and simplified objectives. But they give us an important opportunity for our level design team to gather valuable insight into how they are playing at large before they are finished and integrated into their storylines.

[h2]Story System Dynamics[/h2]
August also saw the final major pieces of the story system connected and working. We’ve finished modeling exactly how the complex web of backstories, factions and relationships of all types will work to ensure they are tracked and useful to the story system. The game is constantly applying metadata tags to track everything about your choices and characters and now can also allow for multiple faction relationships (hates, loves, ex, betrayed, hunted by), as well as multiple personal relationships (sibling, parent, ex-lover, hates, friend).
The casting director component which is in charge of selecting characters to slot into each storyline can use these fine-grained details and match targets by their faction at multiple scopes (Matsumoto backstory or more generally, any Megacorp backstory) as well as character or contact pairs (a pair of siblings, a character and contact who hate each other or 2 characters with milsec backstories and on and on). These final features for the story system are going to allow us to weave the most emergent and interesting types of storylines that are dependent on your past, your relationships old and new and your choices as the game spirals.


[h2]Steam Playtest Success![/h2]
We migrated the entire alpha from Microsoft AppCenter to Steam Playtest during August and it has been a major success. The wins are trifold -- for our team, the build process (build, upload, process, distribute) is much faster and the player experience is much easier (incremental downloads in your Steam client, often automatically). Finally, the game is now fully ready for Steam and integrated with its SDK.

[h2]Creator & Backstory Surveys[/h2]
Last month, the surveys for Creator and Backstory Edition tiers ($250 and $500) went out and we’ve received over half the results already. Cory and I personally review each of the incoming responses and then set to work on planning just how your unique character will fit into the game and larger story landscape. The input from the alpha players who pledged up to these two tiers has been stellar and we’re enjoying every new entry.
If you haven’t received a survey email but should have, please reach out to us here or email [email protected]

Getting those loadout feels

[h2]Upcoming: Power-Broker & Heist Rewards[/h2]
The next set of creative rewards due to open up for input in September are those for the Power-Broker and Heist tiers. There are in total 23 Power-Brokers with 7 of those being linked to major Heist as well. We’re gathering this creative input as early as possible so we can find ways to tie them tightly to the larger game storylines everywhere we can to ensure these special contact creations are highly integrated and important.

[h2]Reward and Stretch Goal Progress[/h2]
For completeness, we include the progress bar infographic in each and every update. If you have any questions about rewards or stretch goals, check out the graphic or reach out to us. The latest change was sending out the surveys for the two recruitment reward tiers -- Creator and Backstory Editions -- and our next major move is gathering creative feedback for the Power-Broker and Heist creative rewards, so keep an eye on your inbox for these emails later this month.

This month’s update is a look at the Alpha -- how far we’ve come, where we are at, and what is in store next for the 1000+ alpha players helping us shape Cyber Knights: Flashpoint into a release-ready game.
[h2]Summer Checkpoint[/h2]
The CK:F alpha started in early January of this year. Since then, we have gone through multiple major cycles of expansion -- new levels, new systems, new stories, hacking (!!), new classes -- followed by periods of rebalance and consolidation. The alpha backers have played thousands of games, submitted thousands of feedback and bug reports and pushed hundreds of thousands of events about levels, talents, and more into our analytics.

At this mid-summer moment in the alpha, we’ve been in another rebalance and consolidation phase. It’s been a good time for it; while the game is still getting a lot of play daily, we are seeing a clear summer vacation dip 😄 – hope you’re all enjoying them!

We’re currently preparing a major new content push of story, recruits and the Sniper class for our next expansion phase. With each passing month, the alpha’s scope is increasing to reach the game’s full scope; our pace of adding content will be rising.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
We are also continuing the push to bring all the major audio-visual elements of the game up to the quality level we know we need to hit for Steam Early Access. Our UX designer continues to iterate on and improve the UI design and the SFX team is prepping for a second project in August to add more variety and depth to the game's soundscape. At the same time we're working through the game's post processing, material design, color-grading and quality settings to get everything looking as awesome as possible.


[h2]Transitioning the Alpha from AppCenter to Steam[/h2]
We did our first online public demo of Cyber Knights: Flashpoint this month for PAX Rising Online, focused purely on the stealth & combat tactical gameplay over a two-stage mission, expanded from our in-person PAX East demo. Not only did we get the game in front of thousands more players, with all the valuable feedback that comes with that, but it also accomplished an important dev milestone: completing our process for building and deploying to Steam.

This is very good news for the alpha backers, because we’ll soon be using Steam’s awesome “Playtest” feature (in private mode, not public signups) to provide you with alpha access going forward. That means shorter (and more reliable) downloads, quicker builds and faster bugfixes.

[h2]Creator & Backstory Rewards[/h2]
We’re excited to have embarked on the first major step to completing the Creator and Backstory Edition rewards. The surveys to gather data from these key creative tier rewards have gone out and include a wide variety of questions big and small. Cory and I will personally review each of the incoming responses and work on translating your creative ideas directly into the world of Cyber Knights and New Boston.

If you haven’t received a survey email but should have, please reach out to us here or email [email protected]

[h2]Reward and Stretch Goal Progress[/h2]
For completeness, we include the progress bar infographic in each and every update. If you have any questions about rewards or stretch goals, check out the graphic or reach out to us. We sent out the surveys for the two recruitment reward tiers -- Creator and Backstory Editions -- so keep an eye on your email for those and let us know if you have any questions!