VYCE UPDATE! It has now been 9 months since I started working on this game, and over the last month I’ve made some of my biggest strides yet. Lets get right into business.

First and foremost, VYCE is now officially on Steam! Please check out the page and wishlist the game to be first in line for when the demo releases later this year. There was also an announcement trailer that I made to commemorate this milestone, and although that isn’t on Steam there will be a gameplay trailer posted there and on YouTube soon enough.

As for the game itself, there has been major improvements and additions across the board that take things to the next level. Let’s start with the main menu, before you even create a save file.

One of the biggest additions has been character customization. There is now 25 variants of the protagonist with varying skin tones, hair colors, and clothing. Implementing this was a pain, but in the end I think it was worth it. Although I automated as much of it as possible, I still had to manually recolor several aspects of each individual sprite and their 30+ frames. I did this in anticipation of the multiplayer mode, which will also include other characters you can unlock by playing through the campaign.

Another major addition has been new items called the Virtue Signal and the VYCE Signal. I’ve been meaning to implement these from the jump, but figuring out how they would work was more difficult than coming up with the concept. The Virtue Signal can be received by doing good deeds in the game such as donating loads of recyclables or helping the homeless. It eliminates all enemy VYCE within a 5×5 grid surrounding wherever you place it, but you don’t get to keep the VYCE you eliminate. The VYCE Signal reveals all the spaces enemy VYCE can land on over the duration of a minute. I’ll let you guess where you’ll get that. Both items are a one-time use but there is a repeatable method of obtaining them.

The Virtue Signal and VYCE Signal in use

As for the VYCE themselves, not only have I added several bringing the total to 57 (out of 99), but now every piece type has a unique range, including the pawns, nwaps (reverse pawns), and knights (multiple jumps in one move). No two pieces are alike, and this has honestly become kind of hard to keep track of, so I developed a new system within the inventory to give the player even more information about their VYCE.

Along with this, there are two new piece types including the swinger and the chilla genus. The swinger can trade places with any enemy piece in a predetermined range, allowing for setups that distract and divert your opposition. The chilla does absolutely nothing – selecting it just ends your turn and the opponent moves. It’s basically a joke VYCE, but aren’t they all?

The biggest change with the VYCE themselves has been adjusting how they spawn. Beforehand, they had predetermined locations, but now, they spawn on certain tiles in the overworld and in other rooms in random configurations that reflect the locale. Some VYCE only spawn at certain times of the day and there are four different tiers of rarity to keep things interesting. There are definitely some 1 percenters that are worth hunting for.

To account for the uptick in VYCE, there is also real estate available to purchase around town that you can use to store your VYCE. The inventory only has up to 47 slots, so you can only store that many unique vyce at a time (VYCE infinitely stack in the inventory). That barely scratches the surface of what I’ve added, because a lot of it has been under the hood adjustments such as improving the enemy ai (the gooner VYCE can go fuck himself) and accessibility features like a more in-depth tutorial and control schemes.

Thank you for reading this month’s addition to the VYCE devlog. It’s hard to believe it’s been 9 months already but I’m more invigorated than ever to keep this project going now that it’s out there. I will continue posting every month and working on it every single day. Have no fear, the VYCE are here!