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Forensic Friday 78: New Storyteller, Steam Revamp and Lots of Bug Fixing

Hey Readers! #

Hey Readers, Welcome to the 78th instalment of Forensic Friday, suspiciously on time as well. Hmmm…. very odd! This week has been mostly a bug-fixing week, but we do actually have some non-boring news to share. This time not in the realm of code, but art. We’ve also spent some time revamping the steam page which was the next natural step following the website revamp we discussed in the last Forensic Friday. The first major news is our new direction with the storytellers.

Rethinking the storytellers #

In the distant cosmos, 5 figures loom. All of reality in their grasp, all that exists, exists with their permission, and they are Gods of Storytelling; their only directive being to create a story that suits their tastes. Once mortals, now ascended, these minds beyond minds feast on drama and tragedy…

This is a very dramatic way to say we have scrapped some of the old storytellers, introduced new ones to replacement, and better figured out their personalities.

The Old #

We should first take a look at the original plans for the 5 storytellers. Back in the Forensic Friday 40 we introduced 5 storyteller concepts. You can see what they were about below.

However, a lot has changed. We realised these storytellers didn’t exactly work out in reality. Specifically Machiavellian Morgan and Arcane Aurelia. How exactly are we meant to make a storyteller emphasise “narrative & lore”, don’t they all do that? And Arcane Aurelia is a bit hard to have when you don’t have any magical anomalies in the game! Maybe we could reintroduce these storytellers back for a 1.0 release, would be cool to make an extra batch of storytellers to choose from, but for now, these 2 were scrapped. So time to fill the gaps with 2 new storytellers.

The New #

The new revised roster of Storytellers is as follows:

Serene Sophia

She is chill and relaxed providing a long time between events, and targeted towards players who just want to build. Being a synthetic humanoid she struggles with emotions and instead takes a very scientific approach to situations. She encourages experimenting and exploring mechanics in a controlled, stress-free environment.

Natural Natasha (NEW)

She embodies balance and acts as the classic storyteller targeted to players who want a thrilling story. She’s a field researcher and is full of adventurous spirit. She loves stories that have high peaks, and deep lows, but also lots of breathing room in between.

Raging Ragnar

Raging Ragnar is a challenge manifest. A good story to him is triumph despite facing terrible odds. He targets players who enjoy the thrill of combat and strategic tests. He’s an OSTF veteran and has a 2 headed pet called Cerbs. His rage is silent and boils within, but can explode out in a blazing fury.

Lunatic Lucius

Lucius has no rules. He is a god of chaos and disorder. He’ll throw anything at you, good or bad, and completely indiscriminately. It’s all drama to him, and he loves drama. He targets players who enjoy unpredictability.

Hasty Hayden (NEW)

Hayden’s sense of time is warped, he experiences time much slower than humans. His stories are fast-paced action thrillers where there is little time to rest. He targets players who want their stories to be sprinted.

You may have noticed that Sophia is no longer the classic but rather now a Chill Storyteller. We didn’t think it made sense for her to have “Serene” in her name and not be… well, serene; and we didn’t want to rename her, so now she’s just the chill storyteller. I feel like I could redesign her to make her fit that personality more, but not sure exactly what would change. I’ve been giving all the storytellers pets, so maybe that’s something I could do. Some pet that embodies chillness, like… a monkey?? No. Clearly, I have no clue what I am doing.

A New Storyteller: Natural Natasha #

We’ve had a little switch-up when it comes to the names of our storytellers. As mentioned earlier, Serene Sophia, who was previously our “default” storyteller has now been replaced by Natural Natasha.

Sophia has had a personality shift, becoming our more relaxed storyteller. Her aim is to create a more chilled playthrough, giving more time for you to solve problems.

Natasha, like Sophia before her, is designed to provide you with a balanced story, and is the way we envision the game to be played. There’s an element of challenge without being overwhelmed, and you are rewarded as such for the challenges you overcome.

Accompanied by her floating cat and adorned with an array of versatile tools, Natasha is a dynamic and multifaceted storyteller. You can see her full illustration in the menu above!

A New Storyteller: Raging Ragnar #

Well, he’s not new, but he does now have a sprite finally which is neat! Meet Raging Ragnar. I found him a bit harder to draw than Natasha, but I am happy with the result. I tried my best to instil a sense of silent internal rage rather than a very obvious “big angry dude”. The original concept for Ragnar was actually going to be just that, and it was very boring, to be frank. I’ve included an image of what he was originally going to look like below:

You can find him living in Forensic Friday 51

I suppose his armour was somewhat cool. We might reuse him in the future if we ever need another storyteller who would look like him, but very unlikely!

Integrating Storytellers #

Storytellers still aren’t fully integrated. We haven’t figured out the best way to scale difficulty or add enough tweakable settings to make each one feel really distinct. The task currently is just to spend time making difficulties match up, for example, raid group sizes, experiment failure conditions, various chances for specific events and such etc. This is all work we can do post-kickstarter. We’ll keep the storyteller simple for now. You can see the new storyteller sprites the in-game roster in the screenshots below:

State of Development #

I suppose I might as well mention the state of development. Right now I’ve been spending the past week bugfixing, which has been consuming my soul and dragging it to the underworld. But we are getting their slowly but surely. I have fixed over 50 bugs in the past 7 days alone, and I’m sure I’ll have to fix 50 more before the game is relatively bug free. But even then thats not a promise I can make. We could spend an entire year bug fixing, and still keep going, eventually we just have to release it and let the masses catch bugs for us (which would frankly be a lot quicker). I have just been trying to catch the most obvious game-breaking ones, and it seems like theres only 1 left, which is experiments not working! But it’ll get fixed soon and my internal playtest will be over. Once thats done, the next thing is closed alpha testing, then public alpha testing.

I’ve encountered a lot of weird bugs I would have never imagined were in the game, its quite interesting just to find these strange bugs. On example was when character hauled items, the item would say on the floor it was picked up on. So characters had telekenisis pretty much. This also applied to hauling bodies and caused a lot of issues if characters stopped hauling before they finished the job.

Another issue I encountered was highly specific. If characters were in beds placed on a floor higher than 0, and you went to the research screen, then exited the research screen, they would teleport to the ground floor at the same position. I’m I’m not even sure where to begin with explaining the cause behind that one! I’ve also encountered another bug with specifically category C floating and walking in mid-air when they are processed, but only when they arrive. Once they have een on site for some time, they return to normal… yeah well when you make a game this systems heav, you run into a lot of issues!

All this being said, the search space of bugs is likely rapidly decreasing. If I continue to average out fixing 10 bugs per day, eventually at least all major serious game flow disrupting bugs will be gone. It’s a very strange feeling ingnoring minor bugs because its not on the priority. It’s almost likely we are going to ship this game with known bugs! But very minor ones of course.

After my internal playtest is done, then a final optimisation step will be needed. The AI has been optimised really well, but the object ticks that govern the logic for every ojecti the game still needs some love. The game can be played and enjoyed already since the lag only starts to creeping in once you get to the start of mid-game, but ideally we’d have none until at the very least mid-late late-game. I’m confindent I’ll be able to resolve it, fixing the AI lag was tremendously much harder in comparison. Or at least I think it will be.

Small changes to raiders #

During my bug fixing spree I made some small changes to Raiders. Raiders now spawn in groups instead of spawning isolated from each other in random corners of the map.

I also gave raiders very scary balaclavas! This is specifically the Anarchy Insurrectionists uniform.

Steam Revamp #

We’ve recently given our Steam page a much-needed facelift, with a focus on providing a clearer, more accurate picture of what players can expect from Containcorp in its current state. We’ve removed out of scope features that aren’t planned in the short term, while changing the wording to better describe the features that we do have. You can read through it here .

Alongside the updated description, we’ve added new, more representative screenshots of the game. These images are a much better reflection of the current state of the game, and also showing a wider range of gameplay than previously. As development continues, we’ll be sure to add more screenshots that will further illustrate the latest (and nicest looking!) features the game has to offer, so expect more eye-catching visuals as we get progress.

We’ve also re-written our short description. The updated description now better reflects some standout features, like multiple floors and anomalies, while refining some language such as removing ‘AI’ from our storytellers. While our storytellers are technically coded using an AI technique, just using the word AI has a buzz around it where people immediately think it’s generative AI or a machine learning algorithm, which we would like to avoid for obvious reasons!

Finally, we’ve set the release date to “To be announced.” We know you’re excited to get your hands on the game, and we’ll let you know a release date when we know what it is! A major milestone will be a marketing beat dedicated to announcing the official release date so we’ll be ramping up the excitement as we approach launch!

Fundraising on the doorstep #

Kickstarter #

As we move closer to launch, we’re diving into the world of fundraising, and to be brutally honest, we have very little what we’re doing right now!

Our primary plan to secure funding is through Kickstarter. While we’re excited, we also recognise we have a lot to learn. We’re currently brainstorming potential rewards that will appeal to our community, such as exclusive early access to the game, or opportunities to get your name in the credits, or even as a character. We’ve seen what works for other successful campaigns and we’re looking to replicate some of those ideas, though we’re still figuring out the specifics. We also want to differentiate the Kickstarter rewards from our Patreon perks, so we’ll have a lot of brainstorming for ideas ahead.

In terms of reaching out to our audience, we plan to start with a pre-launch page on Kickstarter to build up momentum before we officially start. This will also give us a chance to start gathering email subscribers and gauging interest, even before the campaign starts. Alongside this, we’re going to do our due diligence by researching what has worked (and what hasn’t) for similar indie games on Kickstarter. We want to learn from others’ experiences, whether it’s in the areas of reward tiers, outreach, or campaign timing. Expect a lot of planning to go into this!

Outcomes #

So that’s our extremely vague but well intentioned plan right now - research into and try to emulate and recreate the success of Prison Architect, Rimworld and other similar Indie game’s kickstarters.

Our overarching plan, first mentioned in Forensic Friday 28 still remains - that a successful kickstarter will enable us to work on the game full time, while a “failed” Kickstarter means that we’ll be forced to work on the game part-time instead. We’re taking extra care since this is the culmination of a lot of years work, so we hope to take you all on this journey with us!

Youtube #

On the content front, we’ve already storyboarded a trailer for our launch, now it’s just a matter of actually making it! As well as a trailer, there are plans for first look videos, vlogs similar to last week’s Forensic Friday and random drip feeds. If we start this before we release our trailer, then it’ll hopefully get more eyes on it which can’t be a bad thing!

However, we’re holding off on sharing too much content until we’ve made significant progress in performance optimisation and completed our closed playtesting. The last thing we want is to show off an incomplete or buggy experience. Once we’re happy with the performance, we’ll start sharing more, and we hope the content will resonate with potential backers.

Outreaching to Communities #

An important aspect of our outreach strategy will be engaging with the SCP community, which we know has a dedicated following that could be a perfect fit for the game. We’ll be posting on the SCP Wiki, Reddit, and other relevant forums to drum up interest and awareness. We expect this to lead to a significant influx of people into our community server, which is both exciting and a bit daunting. We need to be careful since the line between self-promotion marketing and just trying to spread awareness to people we know will be interested is a bit blurry. We’ll also need to make sure we’re prepared to moderate the discussions and interactions as the community grows but that’s a nice problem to have.

On top of this, we’re considering creating a community site, potentially through a paid version of Wikidot or a similar platform, to give people a place to interact with each other and contribute content. This could help us maintain a central hub for everything related to the game, with space for user-generated content, fan fiction, and more. Our current wiki will definitely require a touch-up before this as well, since it’s been a bit neglected for a while now - and we’ve been shown up by a particular person in our discord server!

We also want to consider how we’ll handle user submissions once the game is released. Ideally, we’ll open up channels for players to submit their ideas, stories, or even modding content, but we’re still figuring out the logistics of moderation. The chances are we’ll have to start off with a “trusted” accounts list and slowly scale it up through manual verification, especially while we can’t afford a full-time community moderator, and especially don’t want even the most keen person “working” for free! We need to do some further research into this, however, because maybe there are better ways.

Trailer plans #

Creating a trailer that accurately reflects the game is no small feat and we’re aware it may take longer than expected to complete - especially since we need to actually make some in-game dev tools to help us film it!

While I mentioned earlier that we had a storyboard for our future trailer (which you can see a snippet of above), that’s more of a “cinematic” trailer in the sense that it has a storyline and shows off the atmosphere of our game. Alongside this, we’re thinking of having a more polished gameplay trailer with some narration to highlight the core gameplay mechanics and key moments from the story. Not to sound like a broken record, but this will likely come after we’ve made substantial progress in our closed playtesting and optimised the performance to a level where we don’t even notice how good it is!

Our plan is to take the time needed to get this right, but we’re realistic about the potential delays. We’ll need to stay flexible with our timeline, especially since we’re working with a small, part-time team. That said, we’re aiming for Next Fest in March, which would be an ideal platform to showcase the game to a broader audience.

Prospective Timeline #

I just want to quickly pop in and say what I expect the general timeline to me. I’ll just divide it into monthly segments: In at most a month time, the pre-alpha build should be ready for playtesting, the month after we should be finished with the majority of the prep and research for Kickstarter, then a month after that, the Kickstarter runs! Well, it depends on how long we’d need to build interest in the game. If the masses flock to the project then we can run the Kickstarter almost immediately, if not then we’ll have to build up an interesting over a longer time. Then after that (this should be around February), we’ll be in a state to release a large public playtest and enter Steam Next Fest in March, and hopefully release the game a month or two after March’s next fest is over (and we have a bunch of wishlists!).

Case Closed #

So to sum everything up.

1. We don’t know what we’re doing with marketing, but we’ll be researching in these coming weeks.
2. Depending on how that goes, we’ll see how long the whole process takes.
3. While time on delivering our pre-alpha build before the close of 2024 is running short, the pre-alpha dev is coming to an end with the final optimisations, so this should be very achievable.
4. As far as the kickstarter goes, if we have a success, we can work full time and hopefully hit our goal of Next Fest in March. Otherwise, we will work part time and take longer until we have a release.

Maybe Forensic Friday’s should just be tonnes of bullet points every week, that was a lot quicker to write! Anyway, thanks for reading, and if you know anyone that may be interested in Containcorp, then point them our way - we’ll appreciate it!

Blah things here lol rawr

Case Closed.
The Team
Plasmarc Studios