Recently Rough Justice: ’84 was nominated for the Colors of Indie Award. So many awesome and amazing games were part of the event, and we had a great time participating! The good folks at Mooneye Studios thought it would be a good idea to put together a Steam event celebrating not only the winners, but also the nominees, and we are happy to announce that we are part of the festival!
You can check out the official Colors of Indie Steam Festival here.
Mooneye Indies have launched their first “Colors of Indie” award this year, where indie studios can win $1000. To participate, developers had to upload a compelling pitch for an unpublished game on TikTok.
You can learn more about the “Colors of Indie” here. We are humbled and grateful to have been selected to participate in the event!
We are pleased to announce that Rough Justice: ’84 has been selected to participate in the Yogcast Tiny Teams 2022 event! Tiny Teams is a week-long festival with livestreams, all day, everyday as they play through some great indie games! It also includes a steam sale for participating games. The event is a great opportunity for exposure not only for some indie giants as well as some smaller gems you may have not heard of before. More information on the event can be found on their website.
Tiny Teams, huge ideas!
Make sure to also catch the other streams and watch the Yogscast crew play through dozens upon dozens of great indie games made by tiny development teams.
We launched our Alpha Demo a few weeks ago as part of the Steam Next Fest, and we've been busy watching streamers and gathering feedback. We decided to leave the Alpha Demo up on Steam, for now, however, we will not be pushing updates to that particular build.
As a small indie dev team, we have to focus our attention on the further development of the game, and maintaining two parallel development branches would be very time-intensive. But don't fret, before we locked down the demo, we pushed a number of updates, so it's a fairly solid build.
We are planning on having a Beta Demo available in the Fall, so stay tuned! The Beta Demo will essentially be a vastly updated version with more bells and whistles than the Alpha.
The updates and bug fixes below therefore are not reflected in the Alpha Demo, but rather in our experimental/nightly branch. If you would like access to our experimental build to test these changes, feel free to hop on our discord and ping us. We've already given a number of streamers access to this branch for further testing, and ofc so they can test their skills on the newly balanced puzzles, to compete for bragging rights ;)
Below we've listed, in no particular order some of the new features that are currently in the experimental build.
SAVE & LOAD
Having this new feature implemented is going to be a huge game-changer- literally! This allows us to test mid to late-game balancing, as well as giving us a lot more freedom to jump right back into the fray.
AGENT SELECTION FOR CASES
After watching countless hours of streamers trying to send agents on cases and clicking on the wrong button, we knew something had to be done. The new "cocking" feature(?) required you to click on the agent and then they are prepared, and then you send them on their merry little way.
HIRING ANIMATION SEQUENCE
We've come to realize more and more how attached players get to their agents, so we decided to jazz things up a bit and have a bit of bling!
GEAR USAGE REVAMP
One of the other major frustrations for players was the use of gear during cases. Previously you had to find the little "gear" icon- and then choose it- now gear cards are shown by default.
NEW FEATURES
- New gear usage UI - Ability to remove gear from agents - Multiple agents can now be set as a case requirement - Working video settings (resolution, quality settings etc.) - SAVE AND LOAD FTW - Agent animation on case accepted. - Agent hired animation. - Evidence counter during operations - Randomised loading screen image - Menu layout update
BUG FIXES
- Minigame - Safecrack lighting - Minigame - Morse code music/ambient sounds - On Load game agents default to driving status - Triangulator reduced cone size - Fake repo contracts rewards - Case monetary loss no longer a constant -$25, randomized - Fixed non-skippable logo intro - Fixed Backgrounds for cases - Contract Icon hover effect changes - Gear cards have appropriate tier colors - Fixed way too many typos for our liking - Fixed VR pop-up warning (need to test)
KNOWN ISSUES
- none. WUT?!
FEEDBACK
What was your impression of our Alpha Demo? Fill out this form and let us know!
BUG REPORTING
If you've found a bug, feel free to use this form to log them. It would be a great help to us!
We soft-launched our Alpha Demo at the beginning of June and we've had plenty of time to gather input. Before the Steam Next Festival started we collaborated with G.round and were able to get some very valuable insight from testers, which we quickly implemented in preparation for the public Alpha Demo release.
One of the biggest gripes that players had was a lack of proper onboarding, which we quickly added right before the Steam Next Fest.
In regards to players, we peaked at almost 500 daily active users, and we peaked with 100 concurrent players. When it comes to wishlists, we had a +1817% increase!
Indie Zone NRW/Nerdstar - Indie Late Night
We were lucky enough to get showcased on a Twitch live stream from the German channel Nerdstar, which garnered 193k views during the Steam Next Fest! They were kind enough to put together a little trailer snippet for the German-speaking audience to give them an overview of the project. They also played the Alpha Demo for about half an hour. Our participation, and having the game showcased on the show was made possible by Medien Netzwerk NRW as part of the Indie Zone program. Watch the whole clip here.
Indie Game Fest
The Indie Game Fest is an annual indie games event in Cologne, Germany. Indie studios from Germany and abroad showcase their indie games, which can be played by visitors. Developers can get valuable feedback and network with publishers, gamers, or fellow developers. Gamma Minus was lucky enough to be able present Rough Justice: '84 at the event!
Let's Play 4 Charity
Also as part of the Indie Game Fest, Let's Play for Charity showcased Rough Justice: '84 and even interviewed Gamma Minus' very own, Diana Boden! The recognized non-profit association Letsplay4Charity was launched in 2017 by Ingo Horn and Dennis Henson as a private initiative and initially existed as a private channel on YouTube and Twitch until 2021, where fellow streamers and industry friends showed themselves in their hobby. Click here to watch the full interview and game presentation (in German)
Content Creators
WOW- we've had the privilege to have so many creative and talented content creators stream our Alpha Demo over the past few weeks! We vastly underestimated the amount of content in the build, and we were under the assumption that most people would be able to bang it out in 30-60 minutes, however, most streamers took at least 2 hours, and quite a few ended up streaming it for over 5 hours straight! Check out some of the recent Twitch streams here.
Initial Reviews
Thanks to the good folks over at G.round, we were able to get some great feedback and some initial reviews! You can check out all of the in-depth reviews here.
FEEDBACK
What was your impression of our Alpha Demo? Fill out this form and let us know!
BUG REPORTING
If you've found a bug, feel free to use this form to log them. It would be a great help to us!
Australian Variety Streamer BlondeLikeMonroe already took a brief look at the Alpha Demo last week, but now that we've pushed a hotfix as well as an update, she's going to take it out for a spin again, an see if she can finish it! She also has a cameo voice over role! Can you spot it?
WHAT TO EXPECT
This build is a WIP (work in progress) and many things will inevitably change throughout the rest of the development process. Many of those changes will be based on the feedback derived from streamers like BlondeLikeMonroe, and individuals such as yourself that have tried out the demo and have taken the time to give us critical feedback.
Although this build is neither feature nor content complete, the majority of the mechanics are already integrated. Some case types are not available in this build, whereas other case types that are available in this build will be significantly rehauled before release.
We soft-launched our Alpha Demo about a week ago and we've had plenty of time to gather input. The number one gripe that a lot of players had was the lack of proper onboarding, which we've now addressed.
After our initial hotfix to squash a number of nasty bugs we focused on dissecting the general feedback from players and streamers. Thanks to the good folks over at G.Round we've been making massive headway, and their input has been invaluable. So, a big shout out to all of the awesome folks over there!
ONBOARDING
This is a mechanic that we had been planning on implementing at a later date, but due to the feedback received, we prioritized it. Immersion is everything, and coming to grips with a brand new game with different mechanics can sometimes be a daunting experience.
Watching streamers become frustrated because they weren't sure about the correlation of certain mechanics was as equally as frustrating for us! We wanted to make the onboarding as enjoyable and straightforward as possible, and we hope we've achieved this.
PUZZLE DIFFICULTY SETTINGS
Probably the second most requested feature was the ability to select different difficulty levels with the puzzles. As previously mentioned, there are 3 different Tiers of difficulty for cases:
Tier 1 = Easy Tier 2 = Normal Tier 3 = Hard
This is not only reflected in the number of successful rolls required during a case, but also in the puzzles. This change however only concerns the training center, If you'll remember, the purpose of the training center is to give players an opportunity to try out all of the puzzles and prepare themselves for their usage within cases. Having the ability to choose the difficulty level is essential in this process, as puzzles scale according to case tier difficulty!
Even with the initial addition of the 3 tiers of puzzle difficulty, we realized that it is a lost opportunity not to add a "Tier 0" and a "Tier 4". With these additions we are able to slowly introduce puzzles to new players [Tier 0] and of course challenge the most hardcore members of the community [Tier 4].
QUALITY OF LIFE
- TUTORIAL ONBOARDING! - Togglable Cases Counter [top-left]. - New Information Side Notifications ("New Agents Available"). - Longer dialogue segments during Operation 1 Lead 1 split down into bite-sized chunks - Tier difficulties added for puzzles in Training Center [0-4] - Stat Rolls "Continue" button color based on the roll result. [red]
KNOWN ISSUES
- Right click crashes game on rare instances - Penny intro voice overs missing
FEEDBACK
What was your impression of our Alpha Demo? Fill out this form and let us know!
BUG REPORTING
If you've found a bug, feel free to use this form to log them. It would be a great help to us!
Thanks to some great initial feedback we were able to identify some bugs that had sneakily slipped through! Thank you for all the feedback, and suggestions! we appreciate it very much.
SQUASHED BUGS
- Fixed bug where SFX from puzzles continued to play after completing the puzzle - Fixed crash bug when re-hiring an agent - Vehicles for repossession cases are now properly shown - Fixed shipped build starting in windowed mode [seems to work, further testing needed]
QUALITY OF LIFE
- Agents now have end shift confirmation text - Case resolution success/fail SFX added - Case resolution animation jitter fixed - Currency format changed to display properly - Audio Settings Slider properly hooked up [music, SFX, voice] - CRTL+F10 = Standard Screenshot [default folder saved/bugit/windows] - CTRL+F11 = Cinematic Screenshot [default folder: game/saved/windows] - Confirmations for New Game and Exit.
GAMEPLAY
– Reduced case officer reputation requirements for leveling up - New difficulty settings for Training Centre: Rookie & Hardcore. - Removed "moral cases" from Security caseloads to avoid confusion.
KNOW ISSUES
- Tutorial/Onboarding is lacking - Does anyone read these notes?!
FEEDBACK
What was your impression of our Alpha Demo? Fill out this form and let us know!
BUG REPORTING
If you've found a bug, feel free to use this form to log them. It would be a great help to us!
We're pleased to announce that for a limited time you'll be able to play the Rough Justice: '84 Alpha Demo before the public release. This has been made possible through our good friends over at G.Round. G.Round is a platform that allows gamers to be an early glimpse of games and more crucially, allows them to give developers their honest to goodness feedback, which is extremely valuable.
HOW TO SIGN UP
It's pretty straightforward! Just mosey on over to their website, register and you'll be given a test key. It is worth pointing out that this test phase is only for a limited time, from June 2, 2022 - June 29, 2022.
FEEDBACK
example of how you COULD give feedback ;)
Jesting aside, your honest feedback is crucial to us as developers! Quite often we suffer from tunnel vision and are so wrapped up in the development process, we end up focusing on the wrong things. The most important this is that players have an enjoyable experience, and testing and getting feedback is essential for that process. Bottom line: if you end up checking out the prototype, then please do us a solid and give us some feedback!
Gamma Minus is extremely grateful that our title Rough Justice: '84 has received an Epic MegaGrant, as it will help us improve our experiences using Unreal Engine and add exciting new features moving forward.
Epic MegaGrants is a $100 million program designed to service and assist creators by doing outstanding work with Unreal Engine or enhancing open-source capabilities for the 3D graphics community.
Epic has been incredibly supportive and the financial assistance will go directly into making Rough Justice: '84 the best game it can be. We would like to thank Epic Games for this opportunity.
We are pleased to announce that the Alpha Demo of Rough Justice: '84 will be showcased at the Indie Game Fest on June 23rd-24th 2022.
Created in 2019, the Indie Game Fest is a curated, annual event that is held in Cologne, Germany. The goal of Indie Game Fest is to create a gathering and community for indie developers, designers, publishers, business associates, students, and more in Germany and Europe! The event aims to help create visibility and opportunities for gamers, indie studios, publishers, business associates, and more to be able to meet and present themselves and their work.
DIGITAL SHOWCASE
The event also features a digital showcase. Within the virtual tour, it will be possible to wander around the digital Indie Game Fest and explore the projects on display. In digital spaces, visitors will have the chance to take a look at projects and give feedback.
For more information on the Indie Game Fest, and to sign up for the digital showcase, visit their website.
