The Terminus Machina patch 1.1 is out! This patch irons out the couple showstopping bugs that slipped into the beta, fixes missing/wrong voices, adds more social engineering functionality, and more. Note that you need to install Terminus Machina first then apply the patch.
Bug fixes include:
- Big Bouncer convo no longer freeze/crashes game
- Flushing toilet shouldn’t flush
- Sattelite dish doesn't turn
- Maps save with correct location text
- Correct updated credits.- Soyfoods give calories
- Skill points don't carry from training
- Recipe on hex gen network for lockpick and multitool now downloads
- Washingtonian audio levels / missing lines fixed
- Journalist – CyberSec convo now starts
- Repeating McSwift Clerk skill point award fixed
- Repeating Kwajalein, Shirley, Tron lines fixed.
- Shirley gives ten silvers after bot mission
- New club music
- Spy on Kwajalein mission less impossible (enemies less likely to detect during eavesdropping)
- Faces no longer disappear when picking up a face file from NPCs and during convos
- Added several social engineering interactions
- A bunch of other smaller reparations
At present I am operating near full capacity with my RL job(s) but I will continue to wring out what free time I can to work on TM issues. As far as the next step for Terminus Machina in particular and my game development "odyssey" in general, I can't really say at this point. Terminus Machina in its present form is in its 'Morpheus' stage, to borrow some symbolism from Deus Ex. That is, this beta is, "A prototype for a much larger system." It's a hallucinatory cyberpunk chimera produced by an ex-game designer dreaming into blog posts and .uc files and archaic BSP editors and onto Photoshop layers; often in a well-meaning but novice fashion. The new game mechanics are there, the hacking, the social manipulation, the offensive AI, all of the other pieces of 'the dream'. It's been built, and, apparently, they (players) are coming.
The initial impetus behind Terminus Machina sprang from my dissatisfaction with modern games, the apparent lack of games with the kind of game design depth, the creative intelligence, and the writing quality that Deus Ex 1 exhibited. The guiding philosophy was, "Stop complaining. Stop talking about what you want. Make it." As such, I basically went full-steam-ahead building, or striving to build, the apex of games. I sought to build the game I longed for, casting aside all excuses such as, "I don't know how," or "I don't have the time/talent". This paradigm served me well over the past sixteen months. But, as William Gibson once quoted someone else saying, "Technique eventually becomes the enemy." This damn-the-torpedos, one-man-army method can no longer continue.
What does this melodramatic speech mean, in plain English? Whether or not the 'much larger system' manifests is uncertain. However, what is certain is that I will not be able to produce it alone. I'll need my own personal Hex Gen, a "decentralized network of hacktivists", actively hacking away at Unreal Ed geometry, crowdsourcing texture files into the greater gestalt.
As the strongest items in my skillset are programming and writing, I'll continue to serve essentially in this capacity, however, the realization of a game longer than the Terminus Machina playable demo is now thrust onto the shoulders of the greater modding and game developer community. If I can drum up enough support from mappers and artists (2d/3d) at least, then, by all means, let's realize the full version of Terminus Machina! I am also open to working on some other platform, or as a completely independent non-mod game. It's open to discussion.
If the full "Helios" version of Terminus Machina is not meant to be, then I can accept that. In that case, I will likely continue to be active in the modding community, as I have loved every second of making Terminus Machina*. Perhaps I'll help with other Deus Ex mods, as the release of exceptional DX mods such as Deus Ex Nihilum has apparently rebooted great interest into modding this thirteen year old, "Golden Age of Gaming" game. I can only hope that Terminus Machina has played some small part in this renaissance of *coughthegreatestgameofalltimecough*.
Interesting read. Hope you can find some peeps to help you expand on this. Props to you for making the effort and doing something about the current state of videogaming.