Project Firebreak has broken containment!
Firebreak Chapter 1 is here!
It's been a long road, but we have the framework for the entire story exactly where we want it.
Chapter 1 is really about setting the stage for the broader story. The result is world building, an introduction to each of the characters, and exposure to concepts that will drive the story going forward and hopefully provide the foundation for the player to build their house of sin upon.
The only thing that isn't exactly where we want it is the file size. Simple economies of scale mean that we either ship very lossy 4K images going forward or develop a compromise. The latter seems more likely in subsequent builds to keep the file size reasonable.
There are a lot more preference options available than most Ren'Py games as I wanted to provide as customizeable a player experience as I could out the gate. You can play around and get as granular as you want with the settings, but I would recommend being careful with the ones that throw up a warning box. If you don't have a reason to mess with your renderer, most will be served perfectly by the default.
Character biographies unlock as you're introduced to them, and some elements of those biographies only become visible to you as the story advances.
Photo and scene galleries can be found under the dossier pages of the character they showcased.
A note about guided mode. If you have no interest in achievements or unlockables, you can select guided mode in two flavors from the settings menu. Hint mode will simply tell you which choice appears to offer the best stat gain. Verbose tells you what that stat gain is, if you want to balance them visually. One note: There are a few stats hidden from Guided Mode that can occasionally have the logic of the choice button prompt incorrectly suggest one choice is better than another. That only happens one time in Chapter 1, but as always we encourage you to play how YOU want to play rather than being guided by points.
In general, Affection build the love and friendship dynamic between the player and the love interest. Trust affects how comfortable a love interest that the player has their best interest at heart.
In addition, the player himself gains stats as he plays, including Confidence, Altruism, and Mesh Affinity. Some choices are gated by the players total points in these attributes.
If you played Chasing Sunsets, you will see familiar faces here. Firebreak does import variables from local Chasing Sunsets saves (regardless of version) and provides a default world state or a customizeable one as well.
While we missed our target date of a summer launch by a few days, every moment of that overrun was laser focused on fleshing out gaps or refining elements of the story you've been waiting so patiently for.
A final caveat: Neither Kentyrr nor I would ever claim to be is a medical doctor or scientist. While we make every reasonable attempt to validate our science and medicine, our goal is to offer escapism with a naughty element. If our narrative lands somewhere between Futurama and Project Hail Mary for faithfulness to medicine and physics, we've lived up to our own expectations.
Be warned, there is a bad ending tucked away among the 32+ choices in Chapter 1. In our opinion, it's worth exploring, however. We did our best to make it feel less like a gotcha and more like a peek behind the curtain of a pivotal character. We've added a mechanism to return to the critical choice if you choose that path.
Hopefully the springboard to the broader story at least pencils in the edge of the shape of things to come. Thank you for generous waiting while we crafted our world.
In Chapter 2, the player will begin to fully embrace his role in story's central conflict and truly grow into new abilities (and opporunties) offered by the unique situation he finds himself in.
We hope this whets your appetite because there's a lot of meal coming.
NOTE: Due to the immediate posting of our CDN links on F95Zone, we'll move to Drifty's Redvault for distribution within the next 24 hours. In the meantime, the Gofile links are restored. Rotating passwords available on Discord.
DOWNLOAD LINKS: Firebreak v0.1
For the Login and Password, they are available on our Discord. Check the pinned messages in the #general-off-topic channel.
GoFile PC / GoFile Mac / MEGA PC / MEGA Mac