Good evening my fellow Kindred,

We all welcome you in 2025 with more of a Devlog than a Dev Diary. We assumed that with another year of development, it would be a great idea to summarize the last one and reveal some of our plans for the near future.

2024 was very busy for us all. With all its downs and ups, we made a lot of progress, especially with the help from our Patrons, and we thank them all for their support! Let’s dive into what has been done in the last year:

Design & Development:

Combat System - The backend was greatly reworked to provide a better experience and make further development easier. It was also integrated with an AI we will be using in the project itself making enemies more reactive towards player actions. It’ll be added in the next update.

NPC AI - We implemented the first iteration of a behavior tree AI with utility AI elements. This will allow us to easily design sets of relevant behavior for AI-controlled characters while also allowing them to utilize their abilities based on usefulness in the current situation.

Character Abilities - A lot of work went into redesigning how actions available to both PCs and NPCs are handled in code. This has no direct impact on the gameplay experience but will allow us in the future to more easily implement various intended features like Disciplines, consumables, and active skills.

Trade System - We designed and implemented a backend side of the trading system. We decided to have two kinds of merchants in our game - one trading in cash and the other trading explicitly in Kindred Boons. All of them will have a unique list of merchandise they’ll have.

Boons System - We laid a foundation for the Boons system - a special currency exclusive to vampires representing their quid pro quo mentality. We intend to make Boons an integral part of many other game systems, using them as both a way to reward the player and to progress the narrative through the gameplay. Boons are vampiric favors owed either by you or to you. Their value will be dependent both on services rendered and the societal status of the person owing the Boon.

Travel & Day-Night Cycle - We designed and implemented the basics of a travel system that players will use to navigate Vegas and surrounding areas. Traveling takes time and there are only so many hours in the night so players will need to plan their journey to avoid getting caught by that pesky, little sun.

Game Log - In the recent update we added a Game Log functionality that allows the players to view a history of noteworthy actions taken during a game session. We intend to expand this functionality further. For example, to allow the player to view how exactly an attack was resolved or how your recent dialogue impacted relationships with your companions.

Morality System - We did a basic design work on the morality system that will reflect the Convictions from V5, but more simply represented by sliders of opposite concepts. During character creation player will tag 3 of them and they will contribute to the overall Humanity construct. All of them will unlock unique dialogue options during the game based on the rating.

Haven management - We designed a Haven Management system that will allow the player to customize and improve their personal Haven -his very own hideout in the city itself.

Cases - At their core Cases are just your standard quests, but we think that as a PI the player character should be able to navigate cases more meticulously than your bog-standard adventurer bumbling through quests. We intend to present our Cases to the player as a net of connections between people, events, and places - and leave it to you to connect the dots and investigate the clues to wrestle some slivers of Truth from the tangled web of political intrigue that is spun around Las Vegas.

Keep in mind that only some of the aforementioned systems will be present in the extended demo. The rest is intended for final release.

Narrative:

We polished and expanded the plot adding a lot of additional content spun around the main plot itself. Right now we are concentrating on Origin Stories for all the backgrounds players may choose from (those were mentioned in one of the previous game diaries last year. If you want to revisit it click here). We are also polishing factions and their goals in the game world (some factions were revealed in one of the earlier diaries - click here to read it).

The story we are telling in the available release will be a part of the main storyline, but it’ll not be the same since it’ll need to be adjusted to the general plot & planned systems.

We also polish our companions with some changes in the roster. You can take a look here to read the first reveal since we wrote about some of them last year too.

Visuals & Art:

Thanks to the support we were able to buy a lot of packages that will speed up level design. Right now we are in the process of the project's general cleanup and implementation of those props. It requires texture adjustments, name changes, and mesh optimization to match our requirements. Some of those improvements will be visible in the next update.

What’s next?

We hope that this year will be even more exciting. We’ll try to push the final update to the extended game jam version of the game but we cannot give you the exact dates at this time. We made that mistake last year and we don’t want to repeat it so we’ll not disappoint you with constant changes to the release date. The next step would be to create a vertical slice with all the important systems in place that will show the very basic game loop along with a game pitch and try to get an individual license that will allow us to transition to full-time development.

Do you want to help us? You can become our Patron through the Patreon page. You don’t have money to share? Don’t allow that to stop you. You will still be able to help out. You can either reach out to us if you have the time and the skills. If not you can help us out by reaching out to more people. The bigger the community around the project the chances that we’ll be able to go fully professional with this game! Here's a Discord invitation.

Thanks for reading, and we wish you a happy new year!