Devlog #30 – Vehicular Fun in the Cincinnati Sun

The last couple of months have been a bit of a dust storm in the world of 2090’s Cincinnati with August and September representing some substantial leaps forward. Last month, for example, we marked an exciting milestone as the game now has over 2.5 million words of content. The summer months also saw our long-awaited major vehicle update with plenty of new vehicles, including motorbikes, as well as new systems for storing and modding your rides.

Of course, this is already old news, and you can read all about it here, but it still represents one of the biggest leaps forward in terms of new content so far this year with a raft of detailed mechanics as well as new locations and NPCs. In short, there’s never been a better time to get behind the wheel and burn rubber, especially with the badlands coming soon. But that’s not all that’s been cooking in our kitchen.

Late summer also brought with it the Summer Heatwave ‘23 – Crazy Clowns, ice cream, Darlene, pink spikes and mysteries aplenty. Not to mention the scorching weather.

We also added a bunch of new content for Double Blow during September, who’s been a part of the game for a good, long while but has only now become the fleshed out character he was always designed to be. We also added more content for Mavis and Angelique, for those that way inclined.

A Roadmap for the Future

We’ve updated our roadmap with the latest tweaks to our planned content schedule. As ever, this is a living document, but we’ll keep doing our best to keep it on-track and relevant. The most obvious addition is Zara. Like Double Blow, she’s been in the game for a long time, but only really as a name and a face – and she’s also long been the most requested thing to flesh out properly.

As you might guess, the content that gets pushed back the most is usually the biggest and most ambitious, but it’s time to bite this particular bullet. This means pushing some other items back, but we’re not expecting too many complaints in this case.

A lot of our community have also responded to our future projects survey (this is still open, if you want to have your say). Thank you so much for all the feedback we’ve received. We’ve been going through it all and will have an announcement about the next big thing for cyberpunkdreams before too long.

Art Imitates Life

As well as the major milestones, as ever, there have been a lot of smaller additions and fixes to the game – many driven by your reports, feedback and requests. Here are a few of the most notable:

• Art imitates life as antidepressants and alcohol now increase the minimum need level for sex and being very drunk now gives you a No fit state.
• The credit-locked storyline for getting out of jail early has received a lot of love, including an exciting action scene, new lore, a new gang, and perhaps a rare opportunity to get contact with a coveted organisation.
• You can take PCP (not that we’d recommend such a thing) and there’s a brand new pharmaceutical in the shape of SVV.

The game is always changing and evolving, and it’ll never stop. Trust us. You can check out the full list right here, on Steam.

Community updates

We just scheduled our first ever live developer Q&A, which will be hosted on a stage channel in our Discord server – show your interest here. The event will be at 11pm BST on 2023-10-14. We’ll have more details closer to the time, but we’ll be answering questions about the world, lore, game design and more.

Call & Response is also still going strong, with lots of creative and interesting responses from the community coming in for each of our prompts. If you’re not already familiar with it, we post a question or discussion topic, and you’re free to respond however you want. When each round closes, we reward the best and most creative responses with unique access codes. Recent prompts have included:

You’re commiserating over your shared misery with a drink at Frank’s. The beer’s tall and cold, like they serve it here. What happened, and what are you going to do about it?

Reclaiming the continental badlands, even a small part of the badlands, would be a daunting task. Environmental clean-up, rebuilding infrastructure, bringing in water. But it could happen, with enough money and corporate backing. The real question is, will it?

Don’t be afraid to say hi

If you have something to say about the changes, have any ideas or questions, or just want to vent about your experiences in the Projects or the Bordertown, we’re here to absorb your feedback. Who knows, we might even act on it in the next update!

And as ever, also feel free to join us in our discord server or on Twitter, where we’re always active with little snippets from the cpd universe.

Until next time!