June 2019 Progress Update

Hello again everyone! Here’s an update on what we’ve been up to the past month!

Debate Updates

We’ve been working hard over the past month to finish rewriting the demo debates, and making changes to debates in general. We won’t be going into particular details with the specific debate changes, but we would like to talk about one major change we’ve made: removing the debate progress bar & charisma stat.

The debate progress bar has been part of the game’s design since the beginning and was intended to display the debate’s progress. It would be influenced by a user’s charisma stat, and to clear a debate you needed to have a high enough charisma stat and be able to select the correct choices.

We ran into a few issues with this:

  • What the bar at the top of the screen did was unclear. It was assumed it was for:
    • Progress
    • How much your opponent liked you
    • Charisma
  • You could choose all of the correct options in a debate and fail because your charisma was too low
  • There was no indicator on how much charisma was needed
  • If your charisma was very high, you would have a full progress bar before the end of the debate, which was confusing
  • Even with the debate bar filled in, if a very bad option was picked you could fail, which was also confusing

So we decided to get rid of it.

Now debates focus more on selecting correct choices, and doing investigative footwork (i.e. talking to NPCs to figure out the correct choices) than choices plus stats.

We hope everyone will enjoy the debate changes!

Demo Status

So what’s the status of the demo? We have good news! We’re targeting to release the demo within the next few months in either July or August! We’re still figuring out the details, but keep your eyes peeled for it to drop in the near future!

What’s Next

As always, we’re continuing to work on the demo update and quality of life improvements! Look forward to the news in the next few months~