2/10/23 - Chaos Chain Developer Status Update

Salutations, dwellers...

Hey everyone, I wanted to leave a development status update today after the recent patches and updates that have been released over the last few days. This post is kind of long, but I wanted to post my current thoughts about where we're at.

TLDR: Game's development is going good, next up on the to-do list is main quest stuff and expanding the play area with more districts afterwards and then populating those with more gameplay content such as side quests, activities, etc. The next major update is going to take some time, so bear with me.

Long version:

For the most part right now, I believe the game is in a really good spot. It runs quite smoothly, I've fixed every bug that I have found that were encountered in my own testing and those that others have reported, and in general, I'm happy with the balance and the overall gameplay at the moment. The combat is intuitive enough, straightforward, and deadly, and it also has some interesting features that I've developed over time. The side quests are plentiful and diverse enough at this time that I feel like I can safely move away from them for now and then return to making more, once we have more playable areas (districts mainly are what is needed at this point) and room for expansion for various other subplots. The atmosphere, at least in my opinion, feels spot on.

I have been surrounding myself for the past year and a half with books, movies, tv shows, games, and pretty much anything else you can think of to get ideas for the genre and to make sure that the "Cyberpunk" theme is well portrayed and in-tact. I don't just want to copy other works though, I want to keep the game being completely my own creation. I've had a few people in the community ask me to incorporate things that are almost directly connected to just one or two other games/movies/whatever and I want to avoid that. I think that with how the game currently is, it is both unique and has enough in common with other games of the genre. I'm biased though, obviously. The cyberware/bioware systems I've implemented offer quite a bit of complexity to be put into a character's build or player's play style and the combat hacking system even further expands this. To top it off, the large variety of roleplaying options and the huge skill list bring even more to the table.

The vast majority of the features, programming, and database content are completed and good to go. There is of course the chance that things will be tweaked again over time, but at the moment, the remaining work for the game is almost all about gameplay content: locations, quests, activities, the stuff that goes along with all of those things, etc. This stuff might seem very simple given that most of the hard work is out of the way, but that is not entirely the case. Coming up with all of that stuff takes time, inspiration, and a lot of connecting the dots for making everything fit seamlessly into the game world. Then of course you have to actually build it all and that's where bugs can come in and inconsistencies and things of that nature.

The very next thing that I'll be working on is continuing with the main story plot. Now, please be aware that this is going to take me some time. Nothing is going to happen overnight. I have a lot of big plans for the main storyline, and some of the next sections in it are fairly large and have a lot of moving parts so to speak, so there will be a lot of room for issues to arise if I rush or work carelessly in an effort to be quicker. I will of course try to make good time with it, but what I'm saying is, I don't want it to be a sloppy - so please be patient with me.

You may have noticed over the recent week or so that I have been putting out mid-sized updates pretty quickly. That is because I was trying to get the game to a good stopping point for the stuff that I'm about to start working on. As I said, there will likely be a bit of time before the next major update is released, so I tried to get everything into the current build now so that you had stuff to do, experiment with, and play while I worked on the next big part of the game.

I will have more info soon, and I'll show off some of what I'm working on as I go.

If you have questions, concerns, or requests, please visit the official Chaos Chain Steam Forums or join the official Discord Channel!

That's all for now, thank you for reading!

-Corrosion ːCStudiosː