DL-021 ∞ CHROMBUS, CHROMBos, chronOS

Hey y'all,

I'm tired, but CHROMBUS is talking now. They now give running commentary on what you're doing, whether that's where you are in the story or what you're focused on right now. There are many lines of dialogue and animations, and we’ll keep adding more. To make it all work, I built a unified targeting system that tracks the player's focused target across both FPS and scanning modes. That also meant reworking the cloneling's targeting, since your weapon can now lock onto the selected target while you're scanning. Targeting is more than just aiming weapons and abilities, but understanding who or what the player is focused on and having the entire set of systems understand that. Nice.

I want INURBIS to be fully playable as a straight first-person-action-immsim-RPG game, or by leaning on the scanner and running all your commands there in a sort of tactical "turn-based" mode. The game is real time with time dilation, but calling it that is a mouthful. It's closer to say it plays in an RTWP-adjacent sense of strategy and "turns." So what's a turn in a real-time game? For now, turns boil down to the current resources (LIFE/HLTH/ENRG/STRS) the player as access to at any given moment. ENRG is the clearest limiting resource, since it powers your first weapon, the Ancient Blaster. Diegetically it's the cloneling's energy, but design-wise it works as a hybrid: active time battle bar + action points + stamina meter.

The game is also balanced around that concept. I want the challenge in the game to be about learning about the environment and the enemies, and applying the "correct" solution to dealing with them - if not, things should get hard, fast. I want each enemy to have some capability to checkmate the player situationally; so the challenge posed should be one that is surpassed by making the right choices, and that the type of challenge is not necessarily something you can slow-mo-combat your way out of. Right now, scanning is free. But in the future, it will likely incur a minor STRS (stress) cost.

But what does "playable as both" really mean? Every action can be manually triggered and manually aimed, or you can use the scanner to lock onto targets, run actions, and eventually queue those into a sequence. Unlike Fallout's VATS, where you're limited to shooting enemies, I want a system that also covers a wide range of non-combat and combat-adjacent actions. Instead of a sequence like "shoot enemy 1 in the face, then shoot enemy 2 in the arm," I want to support sequences more like "stun the ranged enemy by shooting a barrel, turn and flip the switch, then switch to the sword and attack the close enemy." You can also take movement actions (turning, jumping, crouching, etc.) while scanning. My hope is that this lets players freely style their actions in a way that's more conducive to holistic roleplaying, rather than strictly being a game about shooting enemies.

Next month's work is exciting, and covers two things: 1. the CARD system, and 2. adding more purposeful immersive sim mechanics. The CARD system design is finally done, meaning I've fully clarified the rules for how the player interacts with CARDS. This adds new strategic layers to combat, plus a rudimentary form of inventory management. My big goal is to distill roleplaying choices about character building and inventory down to the simplest mechanical decision possible: do I, as a player, want this card or not? Taking a card covers the entire gamut of RPG mechanics. What is my cloneling doing? What do they have? What are they wearing? How has the nature of their being changed? What issues are they dealing with? It should all be in the CARDs :)

All of this has to work with the kinds of mechanics people expect from immersive sims, so I needed a clear system to carry that intent. A lot of it is spurred by one idea: using food to bait slimes and manipulate their behavior. I could have added a quick "throw this mushroom, throw this soda can" on top of what I've already built, but in an immersive sim, shouldn't you be able to throw any object? Deus Ex does this, but I want to tie it in more purposefully and make throwing, lifting, and moving objects a celebrated mechanic in its own right. That means building a new layer to marry those mechanics with the card system and everything I've already built around items and weapons.

On the backend, I'm starting to formalize some of the gameplay into permanent system architecture, which is exciting. I can feel the ring of player-centric gameplay elements closing to form a whole, one that will complete the pre-alpha phase of development. I'm having a good time refactoring.

The scanner and the operating system are going to carry a lot of future systems, which makes them more important than they might look right now. They quietly hold up… the stuff that is coming. For now, though, I care more about communicating the kind of game INURBIS wants to be, and sharing enough of that vision to spark imagination. We're not there yet, but I'm starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel, and I think the demo will be a good showcase of that. The demo will come during / after the closed alpha playtest.

I'm really looking forward to formally closing the first phase of development and starting on the hybrid procedural level generation and settlement + NPC gameplay. Soon enough.

Thank you

HHRRIISSTT