Hi friends!

After several months of slow but steady work (200+ days), we were able to consolidate another big update for Hope. This one is focused on three things: quests, minigames and narrative.

Here's the TL;DR (but if you want more details, keep reading):

• Implemented a new system in our engine to manage quests and objectives.
• Player decisions now have a bigger impact on the story and the mechanics.
• Implemented 2 new minigames: 1) the firewall (to replace the tower defense) and 2) the electricity panel.
• New design for the "tablet" where the minigames run.
• Dialogues now include more callbacks and are impacted by the player's heuristic.
• Parallelized quests towards the end of ep0 to make the game more engaging and improve the flow of the tasks.
• Added intro scene to give more context about Agatha's mission and the objective of the player.
• Major revision in all dialogues to consolidate the storytelling.
• Tons of fixes.

Now, let's dive a bit more into each area.

Quests System

We decided to implement our own quest system to help us track the status of the objectives and the game itself at every point of the story. Previously we were just using variables stored in the database but, as the quests grew in complexity and length, we realized that approach wouldn't scale; the tracking and interdependency between variables was getting too cumbersome.

So, we implemented a system with a richer API and added support for Yarn commands that let us query the status of quests and objectives, not only in C# but also in the dialogues. Our C# API looks like this:

And in Yarn, we can do awesome stuff like:

This was a huge improvement because the quest manager takes care of all the dirty work and we just query it and set the behaviors and statuses of objects in the scenes depending on what has happened so far.

Minigames

Our minigames (including the quick time events) were one of our biggest art debts. The mechanics and the basics were there but the assets were barely enough to let you know what was happening. So, I designed a new "tablet" where Agatha would run all these programs, fixed a bunch of small bugs, polish a bit more the mechanics and even added a few animations to make the whole experience more enjoyable. Even the API was tweaked to allow us better flexibility when calling these QTEs from Yarn.

Narrative

We could say this is the second biggest leap since v0.9.63.20230706. We revisited the whole story arc to consolidate the core narrative, remove unnecessary stuff (bye bye, Arminius!), give more context about the "what" and "why", and make sure we're conveying the right feelings to the players.

In our 2023 Retrospective we talked about the Puzzle Dependency Graphs and the callbacks & heuristics in dialogues. These two tools/frameworks are great! The first one helped us reduce the linearity of the quests and make them feel more "natural", while the second one helped us make the story more personal as you'll be experiencing more the consequences of your actions.

Bug fixes & other improvements

Oh boy, we really improved A TON of stuff in this build! Here's are some of the highlights:

• BGMs are now used to improve the feeling/mood of the scene (not just to have something playing in the background).
• Fixed a bunch of issues associated to interactions with objects.
• Fixed problems with characters not showing up at certain points of the story.
• Fixed several issues with UI buttons (minigames, dialogues, decisions).
• Fixed race condition when loading scenes (now objects will wait for the scene to be completely loaded before you can interact with them).
• Improved the smoothness in running/walking transition.
• Several improvements to quick time events.
• Retouched the main menu (just a tiny bit).

Takeaways

All in all, this new version is a big step forward and we continue laser-focused on building the remaining of the foundations that will allow us introduce new episodes in the future.

As usual, if you face any issue while playing the game, please let us know. You can follow us on Twitter (@satanas82, @AzraelCcs) or, even better, join our Discord server! (we post development updates and screenshots more frequently there). We value all your feedback!

Thanks for reading up to this point and for your support. We enjoyed a lot putting all these changes together, hopefully you enjoy playing them too.

Fly free!