City of Springs has been 5 years in the making, it had to survive loads of hurdles through it's (long) development, like, but not limited to, a pandemic, a change of publisher, a CEO stepping down and of course the challenges of having Unity as a game engine!

But here it is, and wow, are we proud of what we have accomplished!

Of course the game will get a lot of improvements of the coming months, some of them already heavily underway, but creating an open world adventure game like this, with this massive scope and in Unity no less, has been such an insane rollercoaster for us indie game devs.

To celebrate it's release I, Dominic - The Naked Dev, the lead developer and now "green behind the ears" publisher of this new Early Access title will be having my debut live on camera, streaming a part of the game with my unfiltered developer commentary of course!

Hope to see you in the livestream!

Dominic
The Naked Dev

It has been a long time coming, but City of Springs will reach your homes on January 31th on 5PM CET!
The road has been rocky, and City of Springs had quite a few bumps during its development, but we (The developers) held on tight and are now proud to present the game to you, the gamers who love diving into adventure games!

City of Springs will first release in Steam Early Access because we think that while the game is polished and feature complete, we feel that the game is not quite “there” yet and we would love nothing more than to invite you to join the journey of the game’s final development stage!

If you’d like to know more about the upcoming plans for City of Springs, please check out this video:

If you have any questions or like you get involved in the game don’t hesitate to join my discord server![discord.gg]

See you all soon

Dominic
- The Naked Dev -

Hello everyone!

We would like to inform you that a new closed alpha test has started for City of Springs!

We’ve worked hard on the game since the last time some of you had the chance of playing it. Now, we got the full first chapter of the game available for you to try and play.

From 2 March until 12 March you have the opportunity to participate in this new test.
Take your time while playing and of course, enjoy! We can’t wait to hear what you think, positive or negative, so we can make City of Springs the best game possible. If you could provide this form[forms.gle] with your feedback after your playtest, that would be greatly appreciated.

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-Matthijs Kramer, Creative Director, Alterego Games.

You turn a street corner and stare straight at the back of a big robot. Right past him, you see a valuable Modification chest, with just the parts you need for your next mission.
You take a look at your bag of metal scrap, barely half full with gears and sprockets you can use to craft something in combat. Is it enough to go toe-to-toe with the robot? Maybe you should try to sneak past it to get to the chest? Run, when he turns left… Best not to take any chances.

Stealthing and combat go hand in hand in City of Springs. Let’s bring you up to speed on City of Springs’ core gameplay!

Phase 1 Stealth

We knew we wanted to implement stealth in this game and were inspired by the mechanics of the metal gear solid games and the more recent persona 5. In CoS, Stealth will not be the main focus of the game, but it does play a tremendously big role.
Early prototypes had us sneak past dangerous looking cylinders in abstract white areas where we tested character speed, detection range, and the shape of area wherein the guards would detect your character.

We tested with more complicated setups, where one guard has multiple collectibles they are safeguarding. We provided the player with several vantage points from which to observe the guards behavior to formulate a plan of attack.

Objects were added which the player could trigger from a distance to distract the guards. Initially these were placeholder items which symbolized ringing a bell or breaking a glass bottle.

Now all of these ideas worked nicely enough in the prototype, but while playtesting with a select part of the community we quickly noticed two issues pop up.
A) Players were using the newly added ‘run’ feature to run past their targets, and get out safely without a scratch on them. They were bull rushing the stealth puzzles to the point that stealthing was rarely the best option. Much of the designed stealthing areas felt bland to our players, seeing as they could simply run past all of it.
B) Visually it was hard to see where the guards were looking. Players who did try to sneak past, ended up being caught time and again even after having made a solid plan of attack.

To remedy this, our design team went through the hundreds of lines of feedback, talked with the dev team about the possibilities, and created a new feature for the Stealth gameplay; Sneak-mode.

Crouching previously made it more difficult to be seen, as your character was now small enough to hide behind crates.
But with this new feature, while you are in stealth mode, all the things you can interact with are highlighted, and the lines of sight of the guards and camera’s is now clearly communicated to the player. This gives the player the tools they need to navigate the guarded streets of Riveton, and it brought back the planning-phase which we liked so much in our earlier prototype.

To top it off, ‘Health’ is no longer a mechanic isolated to combat. If you are spotted by cameras nearby deployment centers will launch bots against you that damage your health. This makes it so that running past some cameras is still an option, but you’ll have to be willing and able to pay the bloody price!

Our devs are finishing up their work on a new playtest build in which we can test, together with our community, just how much the new stealth has improved. We’ll hopefully uncover features that still need tweaking, need to be added (or taken away) for our stealth mechanic to become solid.

People tend to assume that a games’ design is set in stone when a developer is this far into a project. But as you can see, we’ve implemented quite a lot of changed since our playtests! Community feedback is of vital importance to us. If you’ve got any thoughts to share, don’t hesitate to post them here, or even reach out to us.

Join us on discord[discord.gg] if you want to chat with us about the game, or check out our other cool projects.

-Matthijs Kramer, Creative Director, Alterego Games.

Its 2021… our second adventure game was being prepared for launch, and we had to start thinking about a new project. We knew we wanted to do something in the Adventure Genre, but there’s a million directions to go from there.
Do you go with an idea you know will sell well? Do you continue working on a previous project in the form of a sequel? (and there’s been more than one person asking us to make Woven 2)
Somehow we ended up developing a gearpunk adventure game where you build a drone army to battle against injustice.
What happened?

Theme - Gearpunk
We usually start with a theme to get us concepting in the right direction. All of us have this shared love for steampunk. Even though some team members, whom I won’t name (dominic), wanted to make a sci-fi space opera, the steampunk love won in the end and we managed to settle on a theme.
There’s this sort of scale within the steampunk genre.
There’s the most well-known version, the full Victorian Steampunk, in the middle.
To the right you’ll find the dark and gritty ‘dieselpunk’ where technology has advanced some more.
To its left it has ‘gearpunk’, which is more lighter and usually has less technological advancement.
Not a whole lot of people use Gearpunk, and we liked that little thing the subgenre does where you don’t get depressed when looking at concept art.

The first concept art sat really well with the team and got everyone excited, we found ourselves in a great place to start concepting some story elements.

Story – A Rebel’s Quest
There are many stories to tell in a Gearpunk setting, but we wanted something with a cheeky rebellious spirit to it.
Some creatives on the team wanted the narrative to touch on the importance of freedom, whilst others wanted the game in some way to reflect on the climate change mankind is facing.
Our main writer really wanted to write a female character lead, and the start of City of Springs was born.
You play Val, a rebel at heart, who lives a hard life in the last city on earth, surrounded by wastelands. She’s a mechanic, brilliant at fixing things, and when confronted with the cruelty of the regime that governs the city, she takes it upon herself to do something about the situation. She wants the people of Riveton to be free, and if it takes a revolution to do so, she’ll start one.

Gameplay – Tactical Combat
Content-wise, our previous titles had more focus on the narrative than on the gameplay. We had some cool obstacle courses in Woven, and some scary stealthy action in Sanity of Morris, but for City of Springs we wanted gameplay to be central in the games design.
We knew we were itching to create combat game mechanics for our next title. Something fun to do, easy to learn, but complex to master, that players could really spend time with.

The idea of a tinkerer making her own makeshift drones from the scrap she finds of the street stuck with us. The concept of drone-based combat was born from that idea. In city of Springs you’ll fight guards armed with tons of drones with a small army of your own makeshift drones. You’ll have to observe the types of robots your opponents are using to attack you, and act accordingly if you want to strike them where they’re weakest.

There are a few more core concepts of this game such as stealth and questing.
But this post is already waaaaay longer than what I was supposed to write. Stay tuned for more City of Springs logs in the coming months where we’ll tell you all about those features!

Join us on discord[discord.gg] if you want to chat with us.