Dex - New Year’s News Update

Developer Dreadlocks posted a new update for Dex a few days back with information on the games development that they call New Year’s Dex News. So here a short sample.

Development

As indicated above, we are pretty much finalizing the game. The December update was the last major update without the main storyline and with the game being feature-incomplete. We are now pulling out all the stops in order to drive to the finish line. The process may seem like total chaos, but in fact it is highly organized (actually, it’s somewhere in the middle). Needless to say, we are now putting everything we’ve been working on into the game. Everything that was half-finished or partially-finished, but we decided not to include in the public build, we are now polishing and finishing.

Which means:

• We have finished the preproduction of all the cutscenes, and Bogna is now elaborating and polishing all of them, moving them from concept sketch into fully fleshed out cutscenes, while respecting the art direction set in the rest of the game. This is something we’re all looking forward to seeing; it’s gonna be a blast!
• Axel is now finishing all the dialogues and scripts for the main storyline. We have over half of the story complete now, with an estimate to have all the remaining dialogues done by the end of January. Since we did quite a lot of preproduction on this (numerous internal docs, including all the biographies and backstories for the most important characters and corporations), the job is going quite smoothly!
• Our programmers are now focusing on the hacking/AR/cyberspace functionality. It is still in process and under development, but we can already confirm that after several prototypes and iterations, it works and it’s fun and enjoyable!
• Our two new animators, Kristyna and Veronika, are now finishing all the remaining animations. It is still going to take a good couple of weeks, but we can confidently say we’re moving toward finalization, as we know what remains to be done and the process and workflow are already well established.
• Prokop, our lead artist, has done the remaining portraits and sprites for the NPCs in the main storyline (over a dozen NPCs, in addition to the ones from the side quests you might have met in the earlier releases) and now starts to finalize all the storyline locations. Although we have all of them in concept art, and most of them in color, it is still over twenty full locations, so it’s going to be month of work or more. The good news is that he can now concentrate on this task only, as the animations and cutscenes have been delegated to our new hires).

We plan to have a Beta release—a feature-complete build including the main storyline—by late February or early March.