12-21-21 iDGi Dev Bulletin

Happy 21 day everyone,

Whispers From The Rift:

We had hoped to be able to publicly release our mobile prequel to CONSORTIUM and Consortium: THE TOWER onto Google Play TODAY, but we’re still –

• Working out some of the kinks with navigating the meta-endings / canon continuation chapters.
  
• Processing quite a few new brain-scan images coming down the pipe. To see another sneak-peek at one of them, hop into our Discord server and take a peek in the Whispers From The Rift channel
  

In addition, the Whispers From The Rift Website has received an update. Another closed beta Whispers update is coming within a few days, and the first worldwide free-to-play public release on Google Play will follow shortly afterwards. We also anticipate locking in the release date for Whispers on Steam quite soon.

The VR Game:

We now have this running extremely well on the Quest 2 headset now, and there are still more optimizations to make. We are in the midst of prepping what we’re calling a “Pre-Beta Backer Test Build” of the game, with limited-time-only beta test keys to be sent out later this week! We also have a huge announcement to make for this project, but we can’t say anything publicly until the next 21 day in January…

Consortium: THE TOWER:

We’ve been attempting to illustrate for a couple years now that our ultimate goal in the grand scheme of things is the completion of THE TOWER. Just because we have not been updating the public Alpha build of the game doesn’t mean we haven’t been hard at work towards the goal of its completion!

As you will all see for yourself soon enough, our upcoming VR Game is poised to basically become the world’s first interactive cinema experience on the Quest 2. Given market research by Oculus itself (see “Story Seeker”), all of our practical testing results so far and simply because of the fact that there are NO games even remotely like ours on the platform, we are anticipating great success! We then intend to build a nice completion budget for THE TOWER.

That said, we wanted to leave you folks today with a simple list of all of the stuff already done and is ultimately coming to a future build of THE TOWER directly because of our VR game project:

• Vastly improved combat AI - combatants now react to incoming fire more realistically, use cover intelligently and use various tactics to try and gain an advantage over players.
  
• Virtual Trainer scenarios will be made available to Tower players, giving access to an all new Combat Training scenario in addition to the basic Consortium Bishop tutorial scenario.
  
• The Info Console has been completely overhauled with improved functionality.
  
• As mentioned a year ago and elsewhere online, it is still 100% true that the character choreography pipeline we’ve developed with the UE4 engine for the VR Game will be used to bring all of THE TOWER’s cast to life.
  
• Various improvements to weapons and a vast reworking of all inventory and Consortium Bishop systems (healing, repairing, etc).
  
• A completely rewritten Universe saving system that will allow players to save anywhere.
  
• Consortium: THE TOWER is now going to have an optional VR mode, to maximize immersion.
  

Soon after we’ve shipped both Whispers From The Rift and our VR Game, we aim to be setting our sites back to Consortium: THE TOWER development full-time in 2022, for a possible completion date of v1.0 happening in 2023.

Have any questions, comments or concerns? Join the iDGi Discord community and/or shoot us an email. Until next year, we wish you all a safe, healthy and happy holiday season, and may the New Year bring good tidings for us all…

Namaste,

--iDGi

“There will be obstacles. There will be doubters. There will be mistakes. But with hard work, there are no limits”
-- Michael Phelps