The Invisible Hand News

Hi there! Welcome to our first monthly developer update, known as the Board Update, to let you know how things are progressing on The Invisible Hand.

For the past few months we've been working on content production, blending market mechanics and narration with the help of our masterfully crafted master script by Will O'Neill and music composed by Felix Watson.

This is complex work as we're giving players a lot of freedom to act in opposition to the narrative, and want them to feel seen, while not going down too many narrative branches before our endings. We're achieving this by creating small branches that are quickly resolved and put back on track of the main branch, storing information about players' choices that affect the ending.

People can get angry if you don't do what you're told

In October, we worked on polish and bug fixes as development was slowed down due to health issues of our main developer, Ben. A round of playtest organized by one of our producers, Louis, brought a ton of good ideas. We decided to slow down the rhythm of the game a bit by making in-game days a bit longer. This is more work than it sounds like, as we had to rework timing for events in a lot of places. We’ve been reluctant to do this in the past because we liked having players feel pressured by time, but it was getting in the way of understanding and enjoying mechanics for a lot of players, so we caved to the lobbying.

Thanks for tuning into this Board Report, we appreciate the ongoing confidence and support of our cherished shareholders, and we assure you that together, we’ll make more money than you can imagine. See you next month!

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A little story beat we are working on...

Our publisher, Fellow Traveller is an indie games label publishing innovative story-driven games. Their newest game, Paradise Killer launches today!

Paradise Killer is an open world, murder mystery. Welcome to a whodunit tale where you get to decide who did the deed—you just have to PROVE it.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

On the eve of rebirthing a new Paradise Island, the Council of leaders is murdered and Paradise is killed. This is the crime to end all crimes.

You play as Lady Love Dies, an “investigation freak” who is summoned from exile to decide who the murderer is. Search for clues and find the evidence needed to accuse whoever you find guilty. Multiple suspects means multiple possible outcomes based on the evidence you discover and the choices you make.

What are the facts? What are the truths? Are they the same?

Who killed Paradise?

If you love narrative games as much as we do, check out Paradise Killer on Steam!

Indie Arena Booth is going online this year from August 27 - 30, and The Invisible Hand is a part of the line up!

The event features an in-browser game, where you can walk the digital convention floor and explore digital booths. Our demo was updated with new features and content for the occasion!

You can visit Indie Arena Booth here

There's also an Indie Arena Booth sale on Steam, and our publisher, Fellow Traveller, is having a sale during the event as well!

Welcome all !

Our latest demo is available here for the duration of the Steam Summer Festival.
We're excited to show our work !!

We're at a critical point in development where we want to polish the structure and systems of the game before focusing on content production so we would love to know what you think about the demo :)

If you're interested and want to delve deeper into trading gameplay, we have a few Steam keys to give that'll let you access a longer work-in-progress version, so let us know here, on TIG forums or by email at [email protected]

Hey there! Here's a sneak peek on what's been done and what we will be working on in 2019.
Happy New Year !




Don't they all look happy to be here?

Coworkers play an important part in the narrative and gameplay, and they now have more thoughts to share and dubious hint to dispense.
We use Adobe Fuse CC to create them, which makes importing and animating them in Unity relatively easy. We still have to use custom import scripts to install all our character modules, such as the Dialogue module which has been improved a lot lately.


 



Fitting the stock market/player information/interactions we need on player screens in an ergonomic, functional and aesthetic way is one of our greatest challenges for the development of the game.
The market gameplay was subject to a lot of improvements and new features in the last months, and now that it’s in an almost final state we’re still polishing the UI to improve the user experience.

Stay tuned as we’ll have things to show in the coming months!



The other significant challenge we are facing is player immersion. We’ve had a lot of feedback where players didn’t feel they were making a difference in the game’s world through trading.
As of now, most of our narrative triggers for the player’s action are long term and subtle, and we are going to work on delivering real time narrative elements reacting to how you play the markets.

We already have some ideas, but that’s an area where feedback is very important, so as usual if you want to try the game in its current state or if you want to contribute let us know!