(Future Fragments) New Editor Sent Out + Progress + Adjustments (Patreon)

FrougeDev is currently working on the Cutscene Editor, and then adding features to this month's demo!

Triangulate is nearly done with the Electric Boss, which is pretty insane, to be honest (what we have planned for it, I mean!)

I've been working on various design documents for the music, sound effects, and cutscenes for the Electric Level and beyond!

Rtil  is basically finished with the art for the Internal Interrogation demo, so he's now going full time on the Electric Level Game Over CGs!

Fuyarinpa is continuing his work on the Electric Level soundtrack!

Stenzo K. is back on SFX for the Electric Level!

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NEW EDITOR BEING SENT OUT TO $50+ PLEDGES

So for a long while now, we've been sending out Cheshire's old editor to backers at the $50 level, and all you could do with it was the Fire Level. It also didn't run too well on a lot of computers, with some of them not being able to run it at all.

With the start of the Electric Level though, we've been using a brand new editor with many features, a reworked interface, and quite a few new features that the old one didn't have.

Most importantly though, this new editor allows you to create and edit maps in ALL THREE existing levels, not just one!

As noted before, anyone who's pledged already at the $50+ levels successfully in the past will get this editor entirely free, regardless of their current pledge, and they'll also get all future updates to the editor (the final version of the editor at game's end will of course have all levels included).

The above of course counts for anyone who pledges to the $50 level from here on out too.

Two caveats though;
- Due to some programming issues with features in newer levels, the Steam Vents in the Fire Level had to be disabled in this version; this isn't a permanent disable of course, but as we'd like to focus on getting you all new demos and pushing towards the final version of the game, we felt it best to worry about fixing this later on.
- This build is current up to the last demo, meaning that in the Electric Level there's only the Electric Grunt and the gravity switch mechanic to play with as far as assets; once the Electric Level is finished, you'll of course get an editor that gives you all the features of the finished Electric Level.

We're doing one final pass over on the editor and then we'll be sending it out to backers sometime within the next 2 days!

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REWORKING ELECTRIC GRUNT & OTHER CHANGES

After the initial Electric Demo, some of you noted you definitely wanted changes on a few aspects of it, and we agreed!

So here's what we'll be changing going forward;

• The Electric Grunt will now run towards Talia and slash in one fluid motion, instead of stopping and then slashing.
• The Electric Grunt will change to his beam attack once he's performed his initial slash, but if he's not killed within 5 or so seconds, OR Talia runs out of his beam range, he'll run towards her and slash again.
• The Electric Grunt is getting a 1.5 second charge up on his beam so you've got fair warning as to when he'll be firing it.
• While it likely won't be in the next demo, we'll be adding visual or audible "alerts" to enemies noticing Talia (like the Electric Grunt doing a grunting noise or perhaps a shock running through his body as his gun activates).
• We'll of course be adding sound effects to everything as usual (including the gravity flip, which will get sound effects based on which direction the gravity is being flipped).
• A setting to flip the vertical controls (up for activating things and down to crouch) will be placed in the options menu for players who want to flip those controls upon gravity flipping.

One interesting response we got was the following, which I'd like to address;

"I think that should be more so a personal choice. Possibly some of the grunts prefer range, some don't, some act more like you envisioned. Just because they are AI, doesn't mean they are all the same."

While this is definitely a neat idea and also mechanically feasible, I wanted to address the two reasons why we wouldn't do something like this;

• The first is a gameplay reason; while it'd be fun for a small amount of people to deal with an entirely different AI pattern per Electric Grunt they encounter, it would likely frustrate the majority of players as they would have no "base strategy" to learn against said enemies, making most fights feel random and more luck-based than skill-based.
• The second is a lore reason; Electric Grunts are, upon initiation to the WORM, plugged into a device that basically rewrites many critical aspects of their behavioral patterns. They keep their personality and opinions, but for military needs, they all get the same "attack pattern info", so as to maintain quality/expectations of what the Electric Grunts will do. (And if you're wondering about differences in physique, most of the Grunts are genetically modified to end up around the same physique, as well; got to maintain that standard of quality!)

Another response I'd like to address was this one, in Chinese;

"每次玩都看不懂遊戲裡的劇情好令人困擾我就只有這問題了(目前)"

Something people may not know is that we do have non-English speaking people pledging to this game, and I do try my best to reply to them, either using Google Translate or getting a friend to translate my response back to them (as well as translate the initial message).

In this case, I asked a friend of mine (they have a game on Steam at  http://store.steampowered.com/app/386160/Vampire_of_the_Sands ! The video is somewhat outdated though, so the game looks better than that now).

My friend says that they're saying that "The only problem I have with the game so far is that I don't really understand the story so far".

We're intentionally obscuring some parts of the story so that when you play the full game, the story is still surprising, and so that story spoilers don't leak long before the game's out.

You can read a good bit about the universe of the game though at http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/FutureFragments  :)

To reply to the initial poster though (also translated by my friend);
"我们想暂且保存故事的秘密，那样的话，游戏出来的时候还会有一些惊喜。而且害怕游戏出来以前会有人漏游戏的惊喜。"

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As we've already shown a great deal of the Electric Level to you all, some of these posts will be kind of sparse, unfortunately, but we'll keep posting weekly!

Thanks so much for your support; we're aiming to give you nothing less than the best game we can do!

The next demo, v019, will be out May 31st, and will have a number of improvements and additions :)

(As an extra note too, if you wanted to check out the other two games of mine (especially if you're a yuri or a futa fan, respectively, since we're not doing either of those in this game), they're at http://www.patreon.com/reclaimreality and http://www.patreon.com/hentaiwriter.)