Mode 7 Update (February)

Hello,

I hope you’re all doing well. We’ve been quiet for a bit recently as work on Frozen Synapse 2 and The Colonists continues. Here’s an update for you…

Frozen Synapse 2

One of the most important things about Frozen Synapse 2 is that the city feels exciting and dynamic.

We’ve known since the start of development that we wanted the non-player factions to compete in an interesting way but didn’t quite have the right system for that. We’ve recently added three building blocks to help us reach that goal: ventures, services and districts.

Ventures

Every faction has an array of “ventures” that it is able to undertake. We’ve been prototyping this with Diamond Brothers, the banking faction. Here’s just just a small selection of the missions they’re able to perform:

“Gentrification” — going to a low- or mid- quality housing area and converting the buildings to luxury housing

“Hostile Takeover” — taking control of local businesses

“Currency Introduction” — forcing businesses within the city to adopt a new currency

“Stock Market Manipulation” — sending a team to the Stock Exchange building to manipulate prices

Each venture usually involves a squad going to a particular place in the city and performing an action there, or holding a building. The player can intervene at any point and prevent a venture — factions get benefits for completing ventures and penalties for failing them.

This is an awesome system and enables us to be really creative with how we portray faction behaviour.

Services

The player now has to pay for and manage various services to keep their faction going. These are all placeholders right now but this system will enable us to have ventures interact directly with the player’s management options.

Districts

The city is now divided into 6 districts. Each district is favourable to a different faction and will react differently to ventures performed there. The player is expected to keep the peace within the districts, stopping both the Incursion Force and the factions from causing too much trouble — too much disruption and a district may stop funding you.

Prototyping all of this has been really enjoyable and productive — we are getting to a point now where the city feels as dynamic as we envisaged originally.

Still no word on release date yet — we’re in the midst of working through all of these systems so we’ll plan for the final push when everything lines up.

The Colonists

Richard at Codebyfire has just put a new version of The Colonists into closed testing.

Following some previous player feedback he’s completely overhauled the energy and roads systems in the game, and is working hard on AI and some new economic stuff. We’re currently unlikely to put the game into Early Access, as Richard is making a lot of progress behind the scenes and we’re getting good feedback, so expect this one to hit as a full 1.0 release later in the year.

The Bit at the End

I thought it might be interesting to highlight some other indie games that are in development in case you’d like to take a look at them. Let me know if you like this and I shall continue to do it, or conversely if you hate it I shall never do it again!

This month we have Jump Over the Age’s game In Other Waters, which is a stylish “ exploration game which balances narrative depth and meaningful relationships with a Metroid-like world of intersecting pathways and alien landscapes”.

You can find out more about this game here: http://jumpovertheage.com/inotherwaters

Do give me a shout at news@mode7games.com if you have any comments or, as ever, you can follow me on Twitter.