Officially waiting on Valve to press their magic button and make us live. Many thanks to everyone who helped us get to this point! Which brings me to our first point of the day:
The "gaming yelp reviewer bullshit" has got to stop. We get way too many requests every single day from people offering to give us a good review on steam in exchange for free game keys. What's worse, is that a lot of these all follow the same format of, "Hey, I'm a person who reviews games on youtube", or "I'm a guy who streams and i have a shitload of followers". The more mild of these are simply "If you give me something for free, I'll say your product is good", whereas I've woken up more than a handful of times to "You ignored my request, prepare for a bad review!" And these are people with thousands of followers who are looked at as if they are the source of some "real" review going on somewhere.
Therefore, and furthermore, any requests made to Stained Glass Llama for the intention of getting free keys will be summarily ignored. Any "repeat" requests, threats, or offers from so-called "reputable" reviewers, streamers, whoemever, offering a favorable review in exchange for free stuff will go on a nice little list that I'm building up of "sources you trust for reviews which offered to give me a blanket good one in exchange for free stuff," to be dispensed to your own community if and when I feel like it, assholes.
If everyone who has asked for a free key in the last two weeks had contributed to our IndieGoGo, not only would it have not failed but the game would be substantially more complete right now, so our loyalty and willingness to "do favors" extends entirely to those who actually helped us get where we are, both in the past, present, and future. You buy the game = We give substantial shits about your well being and will aspire to do everything in our power to reward your generosity. Those are our people; Not the legions of wannabe PewDiePies who feel 1,100 subscribers makes you an authority in anything.
There. Now that we've gotten that ugliness out of the way, some good news!
Yes, the game is completely submitted to Steam and waiting on some form of final approval. Honestly, we were simply unaware that despite already being approved, there was a second review process before you choose to launch, primarily because we all know how many Unit-Z copies somehow got rubber stamped through the process, but we're confident it's merely a matter of waiting on someone to look at their screen and click the mouse. Bummed as we are that this prevented us from actually launching January 1st like we'd planned, it did give us an extra couple days to get more work done, which results in some pretty cool advancements.
The game world is so new it still has that new car smell. The entire terrain was reconfigured to reflect a whole new topology; Notably, Malkav and Lomenia now border on one another, allowing us to transition from jungle to temperate biomes in the 3200m border between.
In the southwest, Malkav borders on Akkhera, allowing us to transition from temperate (Pacific Norwest) to a midway state (Colorado) before arriving at the desert (Pacific Southwest). The final region, Anduine (The big red area) is undeveloped and will continue to be so until I'm satisfied that the other three regions look good enough, so don't waste your time walking out there. If you spend 10 hours walking to Anduine, find nothing there, then expect us to "teleport" you back to semi-civilizations, you're going to be let down.
It's all work-in-progress so have an open mind.
Biomes:
All regions in the game world are named after individual continents that exist but are currently inaccessible due to floating point issues inherent in all game engines that have ever existed. There are ways of getting around it, but again, we're two people and it's going to have to get tackled once we can afford it.
Lomenia resides in the Northeast quadrant of the game world. It's intended to be a sort of jungle/rainforest style biome with large vined trees and very little truly flat ground. Like all four regions, it has a beach on two sides. It's home to the largest diveristy of life Rook has (when they're working properly) Including "raptors", "stalkers", and is home to the first of two species of Ennie and Lyra; A very small and dextrous catlike species.
Malkav resides in the Northwest quadrant and is representative of the pacific northwest USA; Temperate. Malkav, and it's borders with Akkhera and Lomenia are dense but have large enough open land to allow much larger herbivorous life forms to roam freely such as the huge Grontos (the large creatures seen briefly in the last video) and a yet unamed species we're simply calling "chargers" for now because of their method of attack. The denser parts of Malkav, such as its border with Lomenia also support Lyra and Stalkers, so watch your ass if you settle there.
Akkhera is Rooks desert, occupying the southwest quadrant of the game world, bordering on Malkav to the north. You'll find nothing there but bones, sand, the occasional giant sand worm or reptile, desolation, and the best concentrations of solid and liquid petrochemical in the game world. Some people like open space, so there you go.
Anduine resides in the southeast part of the world, and will be announced at a later date. While our other biomes are design to be "somewhat alien yet familiar", Anduine will be "almost entirely alien".
And onto Synthetics:
Synthetics are almost entirely working now. Before, you couldn't even try to create one without it bugging out, but as of today, here's what you can do;
Synthetic players (I mean players playing synthetics, not artificial gamers themselves) can now create a new synthetic character and be given a shitty weak android body to house their artificial soul. IF you want a game where you start off super powerful and have nowhere to advance to, there are plenty out there, go for it. However, you're basically only as weak as a typical homo-sapien in that you can move about, survey, harvest, and craft weapons and items, even equip weapons and settle your arguements with violence like any human; You simply cannot equip clothing or armor.
As a synthetic, your "life" so to speak will be spent trying to make certain you have as many spare bodies of as many types as you can house for your soul to transverse to when you die, because if you don't have one, it's back to character creation for now.
Once you can either afford one, or you can build one yourself, you should definitely move up to a combat-synthetic chassis. In this form, you're faster, stronger, better than a human in many ways with again the same hinderance; No clothing or armor. Unlike humans however, your abilities don't simply end on the humanoid level, because you can also transfer your consciousness to any other synthetic chassis you find in the game world, such as the huge military synthetics and yes, they're working.
Almost entirely, as i said. Locomotion, implementation, that's all in place. Even attacks, but they don't do damage yet, so you'll have to be patient with that.
Onto part 2!
