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Gamedec - Definitive Edition News

Virtual detective RPG Gamedec has a new demo and launches in September


In the 22nd century, video games are life. Or most of life, anyhow. Gamedec is the upcoming isometric RPG where you, the game detective, investigate cybercrimes in 2300s Warsaw City. It's gritty. It's swear-y. Apparently sometimes folks get stuck in naughty sex games. That's the video games we know and love, folks. You can do a bit of cyber-sleuthing yourself in the latest Gamedec demo until it launches properly in September, Anshar Studios have announced.


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NEW DEMO available today! Check time zones for specific download hour.

Hi guys! We've decided to share a new, public demo. This build is the newest, and it won't be taken down until the full game will debut in September. Enjoy it when you feel most convenient.

What's new?
  • New locations and a new case
  • NPC avatars
  • Female gamedec model
  • Improved VFX, and SFX
  • Better notifications
  • Many fixes and quality of life improvements

In this demo, you will walk the streets of 22nd century Low City, so it's completely different than the one you had a chance to play before. We don't want to spoil too much, so let us share the time-zones table below and encourage you to share the feedback about this demo in a special section in our community-hub - DEMO FEEDBACK.


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If you'd like to talk with our team members, want to ask a question to the Author of the Gamedecverse (Marcin S. Przybyłek), or chat with enthusiasts like you - join our Discord channel.



Stay safe!

#TeamGamedec

The origins of Gamedec the game - PyrkONline 2020 [Part 3]

Our creative director Marcin Rybiński and writer Marcin Sergiusz Przybyłek talked about the beginning of the game's production. They spoke about how to transfer ideas from books to a virtual environment.



This time, we dig deeper into the story branching, interactions, and possibilities that await players in one of the cases. Listen very carefully if you want to spot all the details, possible outcomes, and step-by-step guidance through the complexity of Gamedec.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

The video is once again in Polish, but for your convenience, we have added English subtitles.

Video edited for Allegro PyrkONline. You can find more at www.pyrkonline.allegro.pl

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If you'd like to talk with our team members, want to ask a question to the Author of the Gamedecverse (Marcin S. Przybyłek), or chat with enthusiasts like you - join our Discord channel.



Stay safe!

#TeamGamedec

Dev Diary: developing a minor NPC

In Gamedec, you are a game detective solving crimes in the virtual worlds. You collect the clues for your investigation using your software deck, professions, and most importantly – your social skills.



With hundreds of NPCs in Gamedec, wouldn't that be great if a player could have a deep, immersive conversation with every character in the game? Even with that somewhat random NPCs just loitering and minding their own business? Then again, some players would feel compelled to talk to everyone in fear of missing out on a hidden quest, a clue, or collectible codex information. That would result in a terrible experience.

This is why we have a mixed bag of NPCs in the game - amongst some complex, heavily branched interactions, there are smaller roles, such as Cowgirl_1, a minor resident of "Harvest Time" - a Wild West-themed, FTP farming multiplayer game you can visit as one of the sensory worlds in Gamedec.



[h2]Developing a minor NPC[/h2]

In the design document for "Case: Harvest Time", Cowgirl_1 was described as a minor NPC, a source of 1-3 clues for the investigation. This limited description gives the designers plenty of creative opportunities. One way to design this interaction would be a simple hub with four dialogue options:

1. Gamedec receives a piece of information along with Clue 1 - no special conditions required.
2. Profession condition - this option is available only to gamedecs with a specific profession, which grants them Clue 2.
3. Branched dialogue: a short exchange with a player decision: one leads to Clue 3, the other results with alternative reward (in this case, Aspect used for character development).
4. Goodbye - conversation end.



Here is a flow of this conversation with some color coding: clues (green), profession condition (orange), choice (yellow), Aspect reward (blue). Such a simple, bare bone design is called "skeletal" and needs to be developed further, even for such a minor NPC as Cowgirl_1.

First, let's call the NPC "Millie" and set up a scene: The player encounters Millie and her horse in a local town center. Since she's not difficult to notice, I decided to drop a few obstacles at the players to prevent them from grabbing precious investigation clues too fast.

At first, Millie will not speak with a gamedec - she is busy with her horse. Instead, she'd only reply, "Don't bother me, can't you see I'm grooming The Princess?". No other conversation will be possible until she is approached again later in the game. This looks good on paper, but our internal tests showed no one would revisit Millie after getting repelled at the first encounter. Apparently, she was too harsh, so her response was modified to "Hi, please, come back later, I'm grooming The Princess now." That small change not only made her appear friendlier, but players would return to her, as intended.

The internal tests also showed that it was relatively easy to get most of Millie's clues, which wasn't fun enough. One more small obstacle had to be implemented to address this issue: Millie only gives the clues if the gamedec wins her trust first. I needed to explore the cowgirl's background a little: horses are her passion, so I started there. In the GamedecVerse, the virtual worlds are practically the only way for people to experience livestock. Millie loves horses and considers herself a horse expert, and she is full of horse-related trivia. But what if all her knowledge comes from games? This is not a plausible scenario, even in our reality. She'd claim that "horses are always awake" (because sleeping horses are not implemented in the game), or "Never come behind a horse… cause horsetail might hit you super hard and even kill!" (probably a game bug in "Harvest Time" that an uneducated player takes for real).

In fact, this exact bug happened to us during the game development. We were tempted to leave it because it was hilarious, but eventually, the bug was fixed.



One way to win Millie's trust would be sharing some weird "horse trivia" collected by examining different horses in Harvest Time. Additionally, if Gamedec owns a horse (you can get one on a playable farm), Millie finds her new horse-buddy and happily shares some gossips (clues).

At this time, I needed to briefly explore who Millie was in her "real life"; perhaps a teenage girl playing "Harvest Time" every waking hour alone in a dark habitat compound, cocooned in her virtual couch. Was she addicted to the game, or maybe there was another reason for her confinement, such as a physical disability? I decided that Millie lost her real arm, a fact that could be reflected in the virtual world: she would occasionally unusually wave her hand. A negligible detail, however a gamedec with a medical profession could take notice of that and discuss the subject with the girl. A sincere conversation with a doctor would surely win Millie's trust, along with a few investigation clues.

Then came a moment of reflection: are there even any disabled people in the Gamedec Verse? I reached out to Marcin Przybyłek, the author of the books and curator of the world consistency. He warned me that I should "hold my horses" as there are hardly any disabled people in his universe thanks to the medical advancements. He added, much to my relief, that the girl might be still recovering from surgery - regrowing a lost limb could be a long and expensive process. The girl's father works day and night to support her treatment, hoping she recovers soon – that's the reason Millie is alone at home. She dives into the virtual world of Harvest Time - a happy, colorful place with horses.



The final interaction turned out a bit more complicated than initially planned. Some color coding for the pic above includes Clues (green), Codex entries (red), Aspect rewards (blue), and Profession condition (orange).

This minor NPC gained some backstory, and while it's not essential to the investigation, it is a vital piece of the world-building. Hello, Cowgirl_1 - you are now Millie from the futuristic Warsaw. See you in the game!

written by: Krzysztof Kurek, Narrative Designer at Anshar Studios.

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If you'd like to talk with our team members, want to ask a question to the Author of the Gamedecverse (Marcin S. Przybyłek), or chat with enthusiasts like you - join our Discord channel.



Stay safe!

#TeamGamedec

Into the Gamedecverse #5: "SLUMS"

Ok, we have to admit something. "Slums" is a buzzword created by our designers. There are no "slums" in Warsaw City. How do we call this location in our game? A mushroom. A mushroom of workers building Warsaw City.



The real "slums" of Warsaw is the Undercity. Ground Cleaners clean the ruins of the old Warsaw. This is where the outcasts live, some of them using technological advances, but most are often cut off from the grid. They have their own language, their tribes, use night vision equipment to see better, and are generally hostile to possible "guests" from above.

Check out this piece of art by Marcin Jakubowski. It is an illustration created for the second book of the Gamedec saga - Locomotive Salesmen.



Let's check our in-game codex for more details about this particular area:

„The authorities realized that new cities, capable of housing tens of millions of people, needed to be built. Vertical cities. Fields. Projects of giant towers already existed at that time (like New Tokyo), so there was something to build on.

The towers' construction problem was that for their foundations, large quarters of Warsaw had to be demolished, which met with apparent protest from the indigenous inhabitants.
Workers originating from the capital refused to work in most cases. However, some immigrant professionals undertook the effort. And they were hated for this. There were acts of hostility. Assaults, casualties. The companies erecting the towers were forced to create workers' habitats on "mushroom" - structures challenging to access by ordinary residents.

Try to imagine structures resembling tall toadstools erected in demolished neighborhoods, surrounded by a surging, angry mob. Now imagine the foundations of massive towers rising beside them.
Now the mushrooms stand abandoned in great towers of gigantic cities. Their finials (hats) are below the lowest walkways of the city. They are often uninhabited because undercity savages don't know how to climb them, and no one else wants to fly there. However, suppose someone flies up to such a mushroom. In that case, he will see a strange, old structure (130 years old), which is decorated with various "additives" - pieces of stained-glass windows of churches and different other architectural elements from the old Warsaw.



The towers' builders took revenge in this way and played off the hatred that the old inhabitants of Warsaw had for them. Inside they are ordinary habitats, something like workers' bedrooms: beds, furniture, kitchens. If someone arranged themselves there, they didn't pay the rent because it was a space, not wanted by anyone. They can put their furniture there, their beds, and so on.

"Slums" are also sometimes called low parts of sidewalks that no one visits. Temporary or more permanent concentrations of vagrants and homeless people can form there. They make shelters to protect themselves from the dirty rains, but they do not stay there, chased away by the police.
The history behind the 22nd century Warsaw City is one of a kind, but what about people who usually live in the "slums"?

We have another codex entry that might interest all of you:

„Report from the psychological study

Study group: children and adolescents aged 7-17, raised without parents, on the sidewalks of the Low City, living without a roof over their heads for at least three years. The number of subjects: 45 children (15 girls, 30 boys).

Control group: 45 children of the same age and sex, raised in Low City in full families. The study aimed to determine the degree of alexithymia (inability to recognize and understand emotions in the interlocutor and oneself), emphasizing the interlocutor's facial expressions. Children in the study group exhibited alexithymia to a moderate to a severe degree.

A correlation was detected between the length of life "on the sidewalks" and the severity of alexithymia. In extreme cases (five boys, aged 11, 12, 13, 15, and 16 years and one girl, aged 16 years), the subjects were only able to recognize the threatening" and "non-threatening" faces on the holograms presented to them. They could not distinguish between faces expressing disgust, fear, anger, curiosity, and shame. They identified them all as "threatening." They identified faces representing joy as "non-threatening."



Declarative tests showed that these children, having detected a "non-threatening" face, needed to exploit its possessor: to transact with him (typical statements: "I would sell him some crap", "I would buy something from him on the cheap"), to extract information from him or any resource that can be monetized.'

There was an observation of marked involution of brain areas responsible for feeling guilt or shame. Respondents asked if they would be able to deceive the holder of a "non-threatening face" declared "yes" without fear. When asked if they would feel bad afterward, they answered in the negative ("He would blame himself", "It's not my fault the bream", "He would do the same", "Everyone does it", "It's the law of the sidewalk").

Twenty children (seventeen boys and three girls) grouped disgust and anger into one facial expression, embarrassment and curiosity. At the same time, they placed joy in a third set, but, like the first group, graded them as "very threatening," "perhaps not threatening," and "not threatening."

The remaining group (nineteen respondents, eleven girls, and eight boys) showed moderate alexithymia when recognizing facial expressions: they mainly mistook disgust for anger, while, like all previous groups, its members found it difficult to identify their feelings.



Living alone in the lower areas of Low City, especially for minors without adult supervision, drives the compulsion to survive in hostile conditions, and the lack of positive social interaction results in the formation of the "psychopath syndrome." It is a set of traits consisting of an inability to identify and understand one's own and others' emotions, a lack of guilt when harming someone, and the subjective treatment of people encountered.

The authorities of Free Europe should begin to contribute to the education and care of young, homeless citizens of polis because they are the ideal fry for criminal organizations and can pose a real threat to the safety of themselves and other residents of Low City.”

As you can see, Warsaw City is full of various social and historical stories just waiting for you to be discovered! How did you find our article? Would you like to read more about the history of what happened to people between the 21st and 22nd centuries?

If you're interested in Gamedec, an upcoming cyberpunk isometric RPG, join our Discord channel and share your thoughts!

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If you'd like to talk with our team members, want to ask a question to the Author of the Gamedecverse (Marcin S. Przybyłek), or chat with enthusiasts like you - join our Discord channel.



Stay safe!

#TeamGamedec