I guess but after what 3 years in development I guess I kind of expected more than cookie cutter platforming and six enemies a level/world.
I dunno man, how many 2D platformer games can you say that have different mechanics per level to the degree we've done it like transformable terrain in real time, reversible gravity with real physics, time-stop puzzles, laser reflection puzzles, day/night cycles that change the whole level's mechanics, portals between different versions of maps instantly, and bosses that aren't the same 2 or 3 loops over and over?
I'm not saying games don't do those things, we're definitely not the first game to do any of these, but I would say "cookie cutter" would describe a game that just straightforward does nothing with its mechanics at all, let alone all the story-based stuff I'm writing about down below.
We're getting all of the base assets done first, then we're sweeping back and adding in all the content once everything's been finalized.
Doing this allows us to prevent having to rework or re-record voice lines or anything else like that that would delay us significantly.
So a lot of the stuff that we've got planned for the game simply isn't in yet in a tangible form, but it is there in the back-end.
Like for example, the collections menu we just put in this build;
every enemy in the game is getting their own entry, as is every object, place, thing, character, all that update in real time based on what you do during the game, your choices, all of that stuff. We've had that planned for a while, but setting up the backend to update everything in real time, track things based on flags for this specific feature, and going over the lore/continuity all takes time, so the code for it had been getting put in over the last few months but just without any tangible way to interact with it until now.
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As far as choices too, with the "values system" in now,
every choice you make alters one of seven values up or down, all of which affect practically every cutscene/databank in the game, and all of those choices are cyclic/affect other things as well, creating a gigantic tree/web of choices. Anyone you kill or don't kill also affects future events.
I honestly would say with a straight face that when it's done, Future Fragments will have more choices and things affected by choices than Detroit: Become Human did, and it definitely has more endings (over 40), as those values all calculate into the ending, as well as how much you did/didn't have sex, and a host of other choices.
Given that the full game is going to have over 150 cutscenes and 150 databanks, all of which interact with one another (and this stuff isn't modular, it's hand-done, just like the art which is all hand-animated, no tweening, no using 3D models then putting a pixel filter on them like Dead Cells etc.), we really want to make the player's experiences differ per each playthrough.
Add onto that over
20+ hours of voicework by professionals, 50 powerups, and a built-in, for free level/cutscene editor and creator you can use to pass around maps online to others, and I'd say we're definitely doing some special stuff that you don't see every day
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You can see an example of just only a part of the changes available in one level (the Electric Level, v0.27F at
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) regarding how what you do matters in this document; check both tabs at the bottom, too.
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For the full game, these choices will be game-spanning, so something you do in the Fire Level can affect your cutscenes and events in The End, for instance.
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(As a last note too, financially, a lot of people don't know how much it costs to make a game like this; Skullgirls, for instance, has far less art/audio total content and far, far less story demands than what we're doing with this and it cost millions upon millions of dollars, something we haven't even gotten close to yet. Voicework, music, sound effects, and then doing everything else with just a 3 person team is pretty financially harsh. We're still living paycheck to paycheck as it were off the Patreon; I have no money in my savings because of the aforementioned costs. Not saying Skullgirls is less QUALITY btw, I'm talking purely in density of said content.)
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That said, we definitely have a ways to go and flaws we need to improve on, don't get me wrong, and it's also very understandable that this stuff can come off as not having much content due to being not in the game yet, but it is coming for the final game and all this time has been spent getting all the raw art/audio/programming assets done so when we sweep back over, it's in one clean sweep instead of repeated rebuilds of everything to get everything working.
Ideally, the final game will be as big of a jump in quality from the Electric Level demo as the Electric Level demo was from the Fire Level demo.
