Fremen's Foes: Redux Chapter 3 Progress: MOTY Edition news

Greetings, it's been 3 months since the release of Redux Demo. I haven't made much progress since then, but I still have some stuff to tell and announce here. In this article I'm going to discuss what happened during these 3 months and what I'm currently planning to do.

Starting with my current progress on Chapter 3: Urban Rescuers ("Loyalists" in the original mod). The most part of this chapter is focused on the streets of City-47 and the main rescue mission of the player and his new companion Jake.

The original city maps from previous versions look pretty ugly and empty. In the Redux I decided to remake the first city map from scratch instead of trying to rework it, as it's original layout was terrible. The gameplay in this chapter will get improved too(I'm getting rid of that generator destruction "puzzle", haha). Updated chapter will feature a few soundtracks from The Warriors PS2 game and maybe Deus Ex, as these games are main inspirators for this chapter. The following screenshots are WIPs. Here's some of them for comparison, as always:

I wanted to make augmentations be more than just a plot excuse for using text to speech voices. Augmentations are the new planned feature, which will aim to encourage exploration and let the player become a real nanoaugmented Male02 Denton. According to the lore, the rebels gather and modify combine nanomachines, which can help in battles and increase their chances of survival.

The new augmentation canisters will randomly spawn in secret places for the player to find and pick them up. Each chapter will have around 1-3 canisters. The REBATCO base(and some other places in the mod) will get new augmentation stations in which there will be all the augmentations previously picked up by the player, available for installation. Every "Aug" will improve the player's perfomance in it's own way, whether by increasing stats like stamina or give unique abilities that will help in combat or stealth situations.

As I can't estimate the final release date even roughly(because "deving" takes a lot of time) an idea came into my head. Instead of making everyone wait a year or two until I finish the project, I can release each new chapter along with fixes for previous ones.

This means I can provide relatively regular releases instead of sneakpeeks only and get feedback earlier, but obviously the players might not want to replay the same chapters over and over, thus I'm afraid of spoiling the complete experience. That's why I'm making this pool. So if people want to see the new chapter upon it's completion, I will release it along with fixed chapters from the Demo.

The Release of the Demo went okay, most people I saw playing it were satisfied with the way I reworked first 2 chapters(even though, it has a few small bugs and issues, which will be fixed in next release).

But unfortunately, some sort of weird disappointment kept haunting me for a whole month and I couldn't make myself work on anything. This is partially related to the fact that I got into university and life haven't got any easier since that point, but even during quarantine I sometimes question the whole purpose of my work and find myself unable to work on it more often than I did 6 months ago. I look at some devs cancelling their projects while others work on something for over a decade and feel bad afterwards. I realise there's always only 2 outcomes: you cease the development - the project dies and gets forgotten, or you take a year or more to finish and release, but you don't know what has to happen afterwards so you don't feel like you wasted these years and you don't know what will happen. There are times when I do something great, get proud and motivated, but then eventually ambitions start to fade away and this feeling of uncertainty and disappointment hits again. The development process is much more inconsistent, than I thought. I taught myself to always try to finish any project, but sometimes my own ambitions don't match the end result and I easily burn out.

Either way, I'm not going anywhere and I will continue the development for now, just because I still believe that what I do is great in it's own way.

Yeah, as some might have noticed, I moved the project from "Released" to "To Be Decided" category, because this modpage has became more about this big Redux update rather than original versions.
This December starts with traditional Moddb's Mod Of The Year event and I won't miss this opportunity to show people my modification.

I've been working on this project for several years, but only the last one was spent on giving it a second, much better life, by refining the level design and many other elements. I do my best to stop people from calling it "just a jokemod", while still keeping it's jokes and humour. I will continue my work on making this project be able to stand up for itself.

But this time I need your help to secure a place in the Top 100. If you think Fremen's Foes: Redux is good enough and deserves a vote then be sure to give it a vote! You can vote for as much mods as you want and I will really appreciate if you do so.

I'm also relinking the previously released 2 Chapters Demo for those, who haven't played this mod, so you can check it out. Any feedback is always welcome.

Well, I guess that's all for today. I hope you enjoyed reading this update just as I enjoyed making it.

Until next time...