I want to start off by saying thanks to all of you for not only your patience, but having worked with us up to this point. Peri has been an incredible journey, and we're proud to unveil a new build for patrons here. This is the build we are currently debugging for the demo release on the ninth. Included you will find the new first level of the game, along with the apartment scene, both revamped and brought to a higher level of interactivity than ever before. We do warn you all, it's still pretty buggy, but we're releasing new builds every two days patching them and refining them, all with your help.
From the bottom of our hearts, thank you, we truly see the end of development looming closer and this is a major step. :]
Please join our discord or DM us here for the mega link, discord preferable so we can take your advice/suggestions/bugs into account for patches.
Please enjoy the Ratical Peri build. Let us know how many rats and/or roaches you were able to spawn on the map without your computer dying, play around with the settings. Basically, we'll definitely have less than 5000 critters per level BUT you can let us know what the upper limit is before it starts tanking performance! - Shodanon
First off I'd like to thank you all for staying with us the last while, as I know we've been brief with Patron updates the last while. I was undergoing a move to a new apartment as my last one was being torn down, which took... an unfathomable and frankly ridiculous amount of effort. We will be resuming normal patron updates from here out, and we apologize for the brief break that occurred :>.
Along with that, I have a video here of our newest arsenal addition: The Kiln Gun.
Based off the real world Remington Master Blaster, these things are used to blast slag off the inside of kilns and furnaces. They're basically shotgun artillery pieces.... ideal for removing everything in front of you as well.
Normal Peri rifles can be seen as for targets, grenades for rooms. This? For buildings.
Look forward to new updates, lore pieces, gun polls, and everything else. And if you have a chance? Stop by our discord!
Today, we have two schway prototypes. The first is the ubiquitous OICW, famous for its integrated computer systems and grenade launcher. This heavy, aesthetic, hell-gun never made its way out of the Objective Infantry Combat Weapon trials... but Peri's world is a very different place.
Our second? The worlds very first ghetto blaster. Designed in the early 1940s, the Rukavishnikov is bizarrely forward thinking with its magwell integrated pistol grip, MP5-style folding stock, and its high "hidden in a trenchcoat" energy.
"Across the wired and in the city, strange beliefs and stranger people reside. Old gods, old rituals, revived, but only "ironically"... unless it works."
This area has been really fun to design so far. When you're working with cyberpunk, as a genre, you can usually reach into the dusty old drawer of Bladerunner and Shadowrun.
But with Peri, set in Eastern Europe, we have some serious challenges!
The world is inherently not going to be what it would be in the west, Europe, or Asia. As such, you have to ask, what is the culture? What do the youth do? Why are they all so fucked up? Why are anime girls cute?
The end result is, digging into that vast eclectic collection of strange, subcultural, and often long-dead beliefs from the 70s through to the 90s. The music, the cults, the people, and what they might do in a place like the PSR. You come to create entirely new things with it, a new Eastern Cyberpunk, with all the bizarre things that would come with it.
We've been encountering corpses of these things on the front a lot these days. Built on the chassis of a T72, with some sort of hydraulic leg system installed. A lot of them are just laying in ditches or scuttled under the sand, it's hard to tell if they were shot out during the war or just hidden.
The Second Union had a habit of that, burying entire fields of MIGs or other equipment, sometimes whole battalions of automated tanks would be placed just under the surface of the ruined Eastern dustbowl.
Remotely activated, we lost a lot of good guys that way. One second you're searching for an abandoned domkulturi to spend the night in, the next an entire brigade of the Motor Rifle Divisions buried corpses are descending on you. It's lucky that the armor on a lot of them is old, worn out, rusted through, or just thinner in general. The armor isn't as important on mass produced drones, so old Stalin left us a gift in the Anti-Tank Rifle. That's how the 421st Anti-Mechanist Battalion began anyhow.
These Szarańcza-things are different, a lot of them don't even have guns on their turrets. We've never seen one move yet, only sit waiting in the dust. The mounds around them often seem unnatural, like they built a shelter for themselves. We had a real scare when we peeled back the eye-compound-barrier on one. Some soldier took his bayonet and jammed it between the ocular-shielding, peeled it up. Underneath it was some sort of oversized human eye, it met his gaze.
We tore that one down, had our mechanics autopsy the chassis. Most of it was standard stuff for an autonomous T72, with exceptions for the hydraulic legs. Strangest thing was it had a kind of concrete mixing plant inside of it, and an extruder nozzle on the bottom. Some of the guys have started calling them net-spinners, but locust or Szarańcza remains the standard name.
Regardless, liberation of this sector is coming along smoothly. Reports say we've captured a manufacturing plant outside the walls of the city. I'll keep Warsaw informed of any developments.
P.S: Send more rations, these captured ones are terrible.
So, what's it going to be ya schway operators? I've been thinking about these two for a while, the kind of grungy 90s guns that belong in any post-soviet arsenal.
Your choices are:
MINEBEA PM-9: Really cool looking Japanese submachine gun from that kind of counter-terrorism era. Has a wood foregrip and a sense of style to it, makes you want to take it out of a trenchcoat.
Or
PP-90 Folding Machine Pistol:
It literally turns into a brick, for if you run out of ammo obviously. An experimental SMG developed by the KBP Instrument Design Bureau in Tula for use with special units of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD).
Leave some suggestions in the comments for the next poll as well :DDDDDD
Indrid Cold, it was a name he picked up somewhere. He thought it might have been from some late night TV special, but it wasn't all that special.
The aforementioned man had glazed his eyes over many times staring at the tube, all the fantastic images upon it. It was his life, his meaning to exist. Never would he have thought he'd find something beyond that.
Yet here he stood, screaming at a smaller masked man about cocaine shipments. Screaming in Poland. Screaming, wearing a pair of novelty spectacles, greasy blonde hair dripping onto his face like bacon fat out of a pan.
He was from the U.K, what parts of that still existed anyhow. They had become an auxiliary for the United States after the incident. No jobs, half the world irradiated, London gone, really some saw it as an improvement. Others just did what any youth with nothing to look forward to do: nothing.
A cigar hung out of his mouth, half chewed, an LSD auto-release implant beeping in his arm. Long coat, shirt that said "wrath", and all that baby fat from his youth long gone. He was tall now, he had confidence he hadn't earned, and he needed his shipments on time god damn it.
No good, his patch had run dry, and his mouth drier from yelling. Three local thugs entered the room, his palm against his throbbing forehead. The sound of the club's hip music blared. It would cover up the gunshots as the masked man became a statistic.
The body would be carried away, dumped somewhere: they always were. The money flowed well, and the blood flowed better. His operation had been entrusted to him by a man who promised him the world, promised many people that. The difference between him and the religious Poles was he could give that to you on Earth. The difference between that man and the Russians was he could give it to you without starvation.
Connected in all things, invisible lines of electricity bringing people together from all around the world. One cause, one struggle, one pleasure, one Joy. Not even here in this anomaly of a city where tower blocks made birds humble could these invisible lines be escaped.
The Communists had tried, setting up committees on anti-terror and the perversion of the youth and blah blah blah. It hadn't done them much good, they couldn't understand what they were dealing with. They couldn't understand their time was through.
The Poles did a bit better, armed with zealotry and a hard-won fear of western influence. They had learned their lesson time and time again when they had been turned on by the intelligence agencies of the world. They still couldn't stop it. The forces of Degeneracion Sans Frontiers were borderless, ego-driven; mad dogs of aesthetic and passion need only the right cocktail of tech and pills to be brought so very far from their ideals.
Indrid turned his head from the guards doing their handiwork to a terminal on his desk. A smirk furrowed his brow, it was a call from the jolly fat fuck leader he so adored. He allowed himself to wonder if he'd finally be told what they were doing in this city, if he'd finally be told if they found the source of all joy.
I've awaited a time in which arms may be laid down, for over thirty years have I waited. I rest within a tower of concrete in steel, my body suspended by wires. But I do not fear.
I saw the rise of the Polish republics from the ashes of the old world order, a response to the collapse of everything. They expanded like a fire, sweeping the plains of east and west under their blade. But who leads them? Who rules them? Who guides the flame?
No one knows, there is a hollow seat in Warsaw.
Well meaning, but unguided: Like a missile of kindness, a warhead still strapped to the front.
As for the communists, who knows what they want. The Second Union expanded further east, taking the Afghans and many others under their rule. Moscow is a city of machines and bunkers. From radioactive statues of Lenin to Lysenkoist depleted wastelands, one can often wonder if any soul lives in Russia.
They fund local groups, but what do they want? Not the Order of Beria, but perhaps merely some kind of misguided freedom. At least they desire something, even if misplaced.
They are unlike the westerners, new arrivals, armed with a blade of decadence and a taste for violence. A youth that achieve immortality by dying young.
But I have been in this tower for so long, I know not how they all behave now. I am but an old soul encased, I can but tell stories of what I once knew.
I had a realization today, how we develop maps is pretty distinct!
One thing that kept coming up in patron builds was people noting that whilst there was a lot of maps, usually with distinct details, they could feel empty or incomplete. This is true, and it's part of our approach! Being two developers mainly who work on maps, assets, scripting, etc for everything within them, we had a problem of burnout/freshness that arose. How do you keep the ideas flowing, the levels engrossed in new and exciting details and architecturally poignant designs?
The answer we came to was to never just work on one at once! Me and shack work on all of our levels at once, in no particular order. For me I'll spend a few weeks on Belgrade, some on the revamp of Chasm, some on Karbash, and in between I'll be making new art and coming up with ideas constantly. If I have an idea, I use it! I won't wait for one map to be done to do so, meaning I can always dynamically work on each. Peri is built more like an art project, a series of paintings, than it is developed in a typical way. So when we do builds you'll get to a lot of stuff that's yet to be fleshed out. But as we get closer and closer to end of development, we finish up the geometry, and now we get to the fun part: NPCs, scripts, writing, quests, everything.
This is the bow on top, as it ties everything together. Imagine a Deus Ex level with no NPCs or scripting: it would just be a bunch of empty areas with nothing to encourage you to explore! But as we refine things further and further and further, what were once empty shells evolve into life filled worlds of decay and stark loneliness. Where a man in a gasmask can tell you to fuck off, but productively, and in a direction that makes you become part of the world.
Something Shod has been working hard at, a possession ability! Lets you take over anyone you can get your hands on provided they are not immune, and allows you to pilot them for tactical interventions and immersive uses. Pretty fun to use, what do ya think you guys'll use it for?
Thanks to everyone who commented on the last post! We're working on our next screenshot saturday right now, so I thought we could do something fun before I post that here:
First thing's first, would you guys like to see me post about lore and dev stuff here? I can write out some snippets and bits of development if you'd like. I am sure you've all seen how barrels used to be doors, and how our helicopter was an elevator for a while.
But trust me, I constantly do stuff like this in increasingly dumb and funny ways. I have a lot more stories to tell.
The above image is one of the earliest pieces of Peri concept art, made in mid 2020. Look familiar? Yeah! It's Marie's shoebox apartment! I feel nostalgic sometimes for this era, it was something somehow innocent. At the time me and shodanon had no idea how far we'd take the project. Now I sit here, two years in, and thanks to all of you guys we're getting closer and closer to release. ꒰ღ˘‿˘ற꒱❤⃛
Hey! I was curious if you'd all like to start seeing more posts/content here instead of just on the Discord. We want to show you all what your pledges have gone to, and how they've helped out development. I'm considering posting updates here to ensure you guys all get to see the fruits of your patronage, would you guys be interested in that?
Another track provided by Bogie (https://soundcloud.com/user-683545842), featured prominently in the current public demo, enhancing the unique atmosphere of the main plaza and hub area of the level.
"For raindrops that was me messing around on piano and with synths to try and create something kinda dark, but peaceful. Iadded the wurlitzer to make it sound more rainy & dreamy"
"You're up at four in the morning, your entire unity project has FUCKED itself. The code is just not compiling for some reason now and you have no fucking clue why, it's been hours, it's hot, your head hurts. You want to saw your own fists off by smashing them into your keyboard.
You get bored of waiting for a git revert to work, so you open up FL studio, and you compose a bizarre ambient track out of rage. This is how this track came to be ..."
"I wanted to capture the sensation of frantically rushing around a high energy place you'd rather not be in, with music you'd rather not listen to. I just had a very strong conscious feeling that Marie doesn't like synthwavey stuff, and it's kind of at odds with the rest of the OST and world as a result.
It was fun to create though, and it fit the area it was made for. This was in a nightclub from an old demo that has been axed for now. It'll probably return later."
"I'm actually not sure what inspired flower, the guitar track was supposed to replicate that one song from lain (though it sounds more like a sped up In The Court of The Crimson King). The drums i just threw on because it felt appropriate..."
An original track composed by the talented Bogie (https://soundcloud.com/user-683545842), who lended his guitar skills to compose something that would resemble an anime ending theme, with Yoko Kanno's 'Spotter' from Stand Alone Complex and Akira Takemoto's 'Prayer' from Serial Experiments Lain serving as inspiration.
Ok, there you have it. To be perfectly honest, we weren't planning to start this thing until our first public demo, but circumstances have changed. To keep a long story short (as some may have noticed), Snaketicus has recently lost his job that supported his work on the game. With some savings, he is able to work on the game full-time now while looking for a new job; those savings are limited, however.
As a precaution against him becoming homeless (again), we're asking those interested in our game for their support. We have prepared a series of tiers that hopefully will satisfy your curiosity about the work being done on Peripeteia, as well as provide value for any amount of money you would be generously willing to give us, be it soundtrack downloads, detailed blogs on gamedev and lore, or getting to try the small (but juicy) test builds for various features included in the game.
Regardless of the status of the Patreon, our production speed won't change and we're still certain of a demo release this November, this is just a safety net.
We also have set up some goals for the Patreon, the first of which is to pay for Valve's distribution fee, finally enabling you to wishlist our game on Steam. Further goals (the reaching of which would be an amazing show of trust from our supporters) would ensure a faster completion of the game.
This was originally composed for the game's third demo, where the newly created residential area included a hookah bar. The area was ugly as sin because I didn't know how to into PBR yet, but the song came out pretty good, fitting a smoke-filled, messy room where those without hope in life come to find bliss.
The track samples a laugh/taunt from Spitfire (https://twitter.com/spitfireva) that was recorded for a previous project that never really went anywhere. The STALKER influence is obvious.
This is the first song ever composed for Peripeteia. Not especially memorable, but came out pretty good. This was made in about an hour during the original Ludum Dare, back when it was called Ninjemnik.
Originally this played over the intro flyover of the compound area with a cool PS1 style voiceover from a mission commander.
The bells that come in at about 1:15 in the song were actually later sampled for the speed implant sfx, which is just the end of the song sped up to a ridiculous degree.
In the world of Peripeteia, the Polish Solidarity Republic has introduced a doctrine prioritizing the use of non-lethan methods in law enforcement and encourages their deployment in military use as well. This is due to the years of soviet regime leading to many unlawful deaths and the former communist riot police (ZOMO) having a surplus of such weapons. It couldn't be used on the local population anymore, but would easily come in handy when reclaiming former 2nd Polish Republic lands and upholding the law there.
This of course is a great opportunity for immersive sim fans that prefer non-lethal playthroughs.
We'd like the game to include one of the polish-made less-lethal rifle grenade launchers. Their primary gameplay use would be launching sleeping gas by stealthy players, however additional ammo will also be available, including chaff grenades, smoke screens and net launchers (the SZO – 84, Siatkowy Zestaw Obezwładniający wz.84, shown below) for incapacitating your opponents.
Source: slupsk.szkolapolicji.gov.pl
We'd like our patrons to help us choose which model of these devices we should include in the game:
1. RWGŁ-1
Made in the 1960s, the Ręczna Wyrzutnia Granatów Łzawiących -1 is a heavily modified Mosin-Nagant rifle, inheriting its bolt action and five round magazine of blank 7.62×54mm ammo. The early versions of the launcher somewhat resemble the original mechanism, with a comfortable grip added at the front:
Pictures by Remov used with permission
2. Late production RWGŁ-1
The later, 1970s versions of this weapon sport an entirely different, machine milled frame with a folding grip:
RWGŁ-2 pistol
A 1970s experiment at using a flare gun (an unmodified Pistolet sygnałowy wz. 78 from Łucznik) as a grenade launching pistol. Its low fire rate (due to lack of a magazine) and extreme recoil made it unviable - however in our world it will be cyborgs wielding this thing. Perhaps it deserves a second chance?
RWGŁ-3
Due to high production price of the RWGŁ-1 (costly milling) and after the failure of the RWGŁ-2, a new rifle grenade launcher was adopted by Milicja in 1978. It's a chonkier, non-autimatic cousin of the 7,62 mm kbk AKM, carrying 10 blank rounds that requires the user to manually cycle the gun due to the removal of the gas tube.
