The day has finally come when the art is final and I am able to update the old screenshots (and gif!) 🙂
Right now the only thing left is to fix some small bugs and performance issues on MacOS. And the trailer, which is in the works! If it all goes well, the game should be out really soon. I can hardly believe it, seems like I have been working on this forever (on and off, but for a long stretch of time).
If you work with press or gaming related content on YouTube and are interested in the game, let me know so I can arrange you a review copy 😉
A quick post to share recent updates. Last week @SiebelGustavo finished a new model for the “Point 665”, the bar that appears in several stories from Taxi by Night.
And to give you a perspective, this is what the placeholder version looked like in the early access version
This improved model will be featured in the next update. And, in a future one, there will be a few stories that take place inside the bar as well.
That’s it for today, hope y’all are doing well during the quarantine and staying the fuck home =)
Still working on the next update. Two stories are already in, still one to go!
One of the stories features a character that will show up quite often, the radio host for New Wenders Night Radio, Gordon Pole.
On another note, @siebel3d has already been working on a new neighborhood that will be added on a future update, the French Quarter:
The French Quarter is the oldest part of New Wenders, and in the recent years has become a synonym for night life and a hot spot for tourists. The abundance of drunk people makes the French Quarter is a prime hunting spot, and with narrow streets and dark alleyways, a perfect place to dispose of your snack inconspicuously.
It’s been a while since the last update on how Blackout is coming along, so I decided to share some details.
The text is finally complete and fully edited. Here are some stats:
Chapter names are redacted to avoid spoilers, since they are basically different locations in the game. There was a 10k words increase since the last time I made a word count, mostly due to additional scenes (and endings) that were added, and also some details added in the editing process.
So what’s left now? Well, there’s some art still to be finished, and in the meantime there will be a lot of testing and fixing going on. Speaking of art, here’s a sneak peek on an unfinished piece.
Taxi by Night has finally launch on early access, and just in time for the itch Halloween Sale!
You can get a 10% launch discount until November 4th!
If you want to know more about how the updates will work, and what do you get for buying the game early, we have a detailed FAQ post. In case you have any further questions, you can leave a comment here, on the game page or even through our channels on Discord, Twitter or even email minichimeragamestudio@gmail.com.
We have also set up a rewards program as a way for you to support the game in case you really like it, or even have a say or become a character in the game yourself. You can check all the rewards on the game page.
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I hope you enjoy the game, and if you do, please let us know, and help spread the word about it.
If you don’t like it, leave a comment as well, we’re doing early access because we need your help to make the game better =)
This week I’ve spent some time working on a crucial part of the game: Flashbacks!
The flashbacks hold some very important story moments, and they have a minigame element associated with them.
Flashback Minigame – Work in Progress
There are a total of 7 flashbacks in the game, and you can get all of them in one playthrough, but you can also avoid most of them, depending on what you value the most: the truth or your sanity.
While some flashbacks will reveal a whole picture of a moment, others are part of a bigger moment, and will uncover only one piece of the puzzle.
How far would you go, Richard?”
I have also recorded a video to show what the whole thing looks like in the game. If you want to avoid possible spoilers and go in knowing as little as possible, consider not watching. Remember this is still a work in progress, and some things will change and be more polished in the final version, like the text boxes, sound effects and the color of the puzzle pieces.
On this post, I will write about something very important that we have been working on for a long time: the map of New Wenders!
We’re not Bethesda, so we didn’t start the game with a map, on the contrary, the idea for the map came in very late, when the story was already finished. More precisely, when we updated the game to widescreen aspect ration.
If you played the preview version on itch, you probably noticed the map is just a placeholder and serves to nothing but aesthetics. But we wanted to make it interactive and something the player can use as a reference for story events.
We ended up removing the “chapter select” screen that is on the preview version. This screen was supposed to appear every time a chapter ended, as a transition to a new location.
Old Chapter Select Screen
But since we now had a map, it made more sense to show the transition through it.
New Chapter Screen
Nothing fancy, the pin just moves from the current location to the new. This will also show up when loading a game, so the player will be able to see all important events from the current playthrough.
The pin show where the player is now. A red dot indicates a location already visited in the current save; A blue dot indicates a location visited in a previous save; A yellow dot indicates a location still unknown.
The player can also access the smaller version of the map at anytime. When he passes the mouse over the points marking the locations, he will see some information like how many passages has he visited and what events happened in each location.
Location Events
The evens will written in bold if it happened during the current save, and grayed out if it happened in a previous save. If the player never seen experienced the event, it will show as ??????. In a similar way, the visited passages for the location appear in bold, while the known passages from all playthroughs appear grayed out.
This will make it easier (and more interesting) for players trying to see 100% of the passages or events =)
This post is more focused on the map itself, later on I will talk more about New Wenders. What kind of city is it? What kind of people inhabit it? What do they feed on?
A noir game where a vampire drives a taxi in the streets of New Wenders.
You play as the taxi driver, and get to talk with the passengers through a series of branching dialogues.
Ultimately, you can choose whether you want to take them to their destination or feed on them.
Taxi By Night was made in 5 days for #VampireJam, so it’s very small in scope, I used it mostly to learn a bit of 3d development. The game will be updated with more story bits 🙂
All 3D models are from Quaternius. You can get them for free on his website and support him on patreon.
At first I decided to add keyboard control to make testing easier and faster (also tendinitis), but then I realized it might actually be a better way to play rather than using the mouse.
For the regular gameplay, you can advance pages with the left and right arrow, and make choices with numbers 1 to 5.
The white font on the third choice means this option was already selected on a previous play-through, since the game has many different paths, I thought it would be nice for the player to visualize which options are new to him.
The SPACE key has a different function depending on the context. In most places it will act as a mouse click (advancing a dialog cutscene, maximizing/minimizing an image), but it is also used in the minigames. By the way, if you played the demo version, you will notice that the minigames are now linked to the relevant attributes, so they will be harder or easier depending on the value of your attribute.
Fitness-based mini-game
And of course you can access the Map (M), File (F) and Options (O).
Besides that, I’ve also started working on polishing some aspects like adding fade in/out and adding some animation to tape-covered text.
“I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity” – Edgar Allan Poe
I first used this effect on the teaser trailer, but I liked the effect so much that I decided to add it to the game as well, it brings a nice dramatic effect and also invokes the comic book style =)
Mini Chimera Game Studio 