It’s a design decision meant to support ease of customization, so you don’t have to restart the whole thing to get a new pick. It’s a bit heavier on the coding, but it provides a lot of saved time for the player. It’s annoying to go through the beginning over and over again just because you changed your mind or picked the wrong option.
Update time:
Best of us has now been in development for four an a half months, with slower progress throughout the summer than I had hoped for from myself. The story at this point runs around an average of 23k words, with the total from the whole game coming around 30k words. I’ve tried to keep code and choice text out of the totals.
A few things have changed as I have been shaping the story, one major point being that I have removed the option to work for the greedy corporation as IT. I understand some people were excited about that being there, but I did not find a good way to tie it into the core storyline and thus abandoned it. At least for now.
Another thing is that instead of clear-cut morality in place - and thus making a distinction between hero and villain - I have decided to maintain a morality that is mostly grey. There will remain options to make your character more of a hero, but there will also be choices that would skirt closer to antihero and villain. My hopes are that I will be able to convey through the reader that all actions that you are able to take are justifiable. Mind you, these choices will not be dependent on the Brutal/Benign opposed stats that you are able to see.
I have also redone the core stats of the character. After my decision to have every character have some semblance of powers, the actual differences between the three stats on the body-intellect-social axis are largely meaningless. In order to aim for a simpler and more understandable system for everyone involved, I have cut it down into a body-mind duality.
I am back on a roll at current time, however, and hopefully I will be able to set some concrete deadlines for myself for autumn and push harder for larger updates. My current deadline is to get the core storyline done by early November.
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I can become a villain in the end?
Er, quick question I’ve been wondering about: is the red from the “NEW DAWN” room supposed to be blood?
@Damian Short answer is “Yes”. Long answer is “Kind of” and then goes into a thesis about morality and heroic ethics.
@forWantOf Is it? I don’t know. Might be spray paint. It’s fairly vague, isn’t it?
Will you notify us when there is an update?
Yes. I am working on the latter half of the next chapter. Once that’s tested and open in the beta, I will inform you guys. Should be within the next two weeks.
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Update is up!
I am still closing off the chapter, but I should get it done tomorrow. The rest is a fair bit more linear than the couple of fight scenes that have been the meat of my work for the last few months.
If you have any qualms, ideas or additions that you would like to see in said fight scenes, I’m all ears. If you find typos or continuity errors, report them and I’ll get right to fixing it up. It’s more than likely that I’ve messed up something somewhere in there, since there’s a fair bit of code and I went through a good number of revisions of it throughout the process.
The entire game is now roughly around 40k words. One read-through should be within a 25k to 30k word range.
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I really enjoy what you have so far it’s really great
Pretty interesting story thus far. I also couldn’t find any typos on my play through but I may have been unobservant enough. Because honestly as far as super hero stories go I’m enjoying this a lot more than Heroes Rise so far.
When walking away from the person with the voice modulator it says ‘she’ then starts using ‘he’ and ‘him’
maybe its like intentional? Like keeping the gender neutral and stuff.
But it would’ve been better if it said ‘they’ or ‘them’ or ‘that person that we don’t know if they are male or female’ you know, the basics.
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Gender is supposed to be indeterminable in that scene, but I had a feeling a few still slipped in. I’ll go through it again and fix that.
EDIT: Should be a pronounless scene now. I could not find another one by searching, but that doesn’t mean I found all of them. If you find that it refers to a female or male gender at some point, report it and I’ll fix it. A few words around it will help immensely when looking for the exact location.
EDIT 2: Second update is up and the chapter has reached it’s end. I will begin working on the next chapter next week.
Ok, so you got me screaming at my phone “Noooo, i need more of this” when i finished the Demo,no big deal.
I REALLY like this, and the fact that i can choose my mother language and origins is really nice, makes it feel more personal for me. I want to see this come to light as a finished work soon. 
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Aye it’s (language select etc) actually a pretty neat that you can do that. I, as a Russian, approve greatly of that. Surprising other games don’t use it but then again I highly doubt it has much impact on the game.
Although it’s a shame that if you pick native language as English then you don’t get a secondary choice. As you technically do when you choose not English. Oh well being a Russian who can’t talk/write/use Russian is actually pretty accurate to my real life character.
I really enjoyed this,really. I definitely want more, the cliffhanger made me curse for ending the story. There is some questions I would like to ask:
-The first time you encounter Nightreaver you have the option to tell him that you want to be a beacon of leadership, will I be able to have some kind of organization that would fit this criteria? And you said that we could turn to be a villain depending on our choices, will I be able to arrange to be both and have an evil controlling organization?
-Still in the topic of villains, will I be able to be one on both sides or on a neutral path ( there will be one?) and eventually, will I be able to kill the superheroes for my master plan? Or even make them come to my side?
-Will I be able to control/influence New Dawn for my master plan?
I’m glad the latest chapter is getting this kind of a reception. Things are kicking off. How you conduct yourself as the character will be pulled out into the limelight in the next chapter.
@RJM I originally intended to have organizations you could get more involved with, but I’ve had to cut back on that due to not having a good idea as to how I can implement it without derailing the plot I have going. I will figure out some limited implementation of this towards the late game, but I won’t go into great detail about it.
You will be able to make moral choices as to how you approach your adversaries that could be taken as villainous. You will be able to influence some major events with certain decisions, which will have an effect on New Dawn. You will be able to screw over the other heroes as well.
First off i love the new content. Second i have an idea for teleportation. If you have seen the movie jumper you will probably know what I’m talking about, can we use multiple fast forward teleports to increase our momentum to increase our strikes like they do in the movie? It would allow people without super strength to hit a whole lot harder and give those who do a whole new move set. I’ve just had this idea for a while and wondered what everyone thought. Again love how this is going so far, keep doing an awesome job.
So it’s basically a portal gun without the gun.
e.g use the fact that we retain our momentum to hit things better.