Hi. I’m Ritchie, lead developer and BDFL of Socially Distant. Although development has been relatively silent lately, we’ve still been pretty busy planning things. One of my goals is to make the game easier to maintain. I think that’s actually where I’d like to start: getting this game to be a bit more organized in how it’s made. So let’s start with a roadmap for 2025. We’ve gotten pretty far just going with the flow, but where do we go from here?
What is Socially Distant?
In case you’re not familiar with what this game is, or if you need a refresher, Socially Distant is an in-development narrative hacking game set during a viral outbreak. It follows the story of a hacker, caught in the crossfire of a major ransomware attack on the healthcare system.
Where are we now?
What does Socially Distant look like right now?
The game engine
At the start of 2024, we were using Unity. That version of the game had several in-game mechanics prototyped and working. In June, we decided to port to a custom game engine for many reasons. This new engine is now at parity with the old Unity version of the game, albeit with some missing user interface polish. The engine is ready enough to be used for the game, and has even received limited performance testing on low-end hardware.
Gameplay
As far as the game itself goes, most of the narrative gameplay elements have been put into place. You can chat with NPCs, receive mission emails, complete missions, and even browse the in-game Internet. Hacking gameplay, however, has yet to be figured out.
Platform support and development workflow
Docker images have been made for building Socially Distant from source. This allows the game to be built by services like GitHub Actions or GitLab CI/CD. This allows more frequent, automatic updates for Linux players when the game is released.
Recently, thanks to help from the John Hammond Discord community, we were able to identify that Socially Distant was being flagged as a Windows Defender false positive. The offending code has been stripped from the game, allowing the game to be compiled and run on Windows systems without excluding it in Windows Defender.
With the help of our supporters on Patreon, we were able to set up auto-scaling Windows Server build agents for Socially Distant. This means that the game can be automatically built and deployed for Windows.
With some minor help from Valve via Steamworks support, we were able to set up a Docker image for automatically uploading builds of Socially Distant to Steam and setting them live for you to eventually play. When the game releases, you will be able to opt into playing either the master or devel branches of the game, which get deployed to Steam on every commit to the associated Git branches.
On the Linux side, thanks to Hari Rana, the game’s support for Wayland has been improved. By that, we mean that it exists at all. If the game detects a Wayland session, it will use Wayland. Otherwise, it will fallback to X11. Wayland users can turn Wayland mode off in System Settings, which may help with getting around bugs we haven’t discovered yet.
Cool stuff
The game’s font renderer has been completely redone. Since the game has a lot of reading, it’s important for text to be legible. The new font renderer uses FreeType directly, rather than relying on FontStashSharp. This means we have direct control over how glyphs are packed, anti-aliased, hinted, measured, and otherwise laid out. Support for COLR-based fonts have also been added, which allows for emoji.
The background blur shader for the in-game Terminal has been rewritten to be a more smooth-looking and less-expensive blur. It is also the basis for the game’s bloom effect.
A custom asset bundler is being worked on for the game, and my future games. It’ll allow for streaming assets like music as well as be an efficient storage system for all content assets any of my games could ever need.
Community
Support for logging in with Steam has been added to acidic light community accounts. You can now link your Steam account to your acidic light community account, and use it to log in.
Socially Distant has moved from GitHub to GitLab Enterprise Edition. We did this to better facilitate development of Career Mode. While it is definitely possible to use GitHub or any other cloud-based Git providers to host the game’s code and assets, hosting our own GitLab server allows us to use hardware we control. Since some assets used in Career Mode are licensed and can’t be distributed publicly, this helps us keep those assets safe as well - without losing out on the benefits of having GitLab.
What’s the plan for 2025?
It’s good to know where the game is at right now. But where is it heading? What do we plan to implement over the next year? What milestones are coming?
A bit about how I manage time
Ummmmmm… I don’t. I’ve never been good at it, I’ve never been good at sticking to schedules, deadlines just stress me out. Mostly, my best programming work is done when I feel like doing it and sometimes I do not.
That being said, since the game is getting ever closer to an eventual release, I’d like to at least vaguely stick to some sort pf plan. I’ll likely implement some sort of seasonal deadline for groups of tasks in the game’s development. I can’t promise something’ll be done in a week, but I can at least try to get it done by the end of summer. Or, at the very least, have most of the work done by then.
With that in mind, I’m not going to make any promises for when something may be finished. Consider this more of a guide for what we want to work on, rather than when we want to work on it.
With that in mind, hacking.
This is a hacking game, it needs a hacking mechanic.
One of the main challenges with the game’s hacking system is striking a balance between fun gameplay, realistic hacking, and the hacking movie experience. We don’t want the hacking system to feel silly, but real-life hacking is neither visually nor audibly interesting. It is also really tedious and difficult, and not the same kind of difficult you want in a video game.
Our goal for this year is to overcome that challenge. It may involve blood-pumpin’ music and hacking humans.
A taste of what’s comin’
We’d like to release a free, playable demo of Career Mode’s first few missions. This would act as a minimum viable product for the game, and also allow everyone to get a taste of gameplay while Career Mode’s development continues.
This would also serve as a way to test what it’s like to actually release the game publicly. The demo version of the game would be available as a direct download, rather than being distributed on Steam.
Growing the team
We have already brought on AshesOfEther a community moderator for the “acidic lighthouse” Discord Server, which allows us to focus more time on the game’s development and/or sleeping.
We’ve also brought on FeTetra as a second project maintainer. He is a programmer, story writer and an aspiring soundtrack composer. He is volunteering his time for the game and we (and I, personally) are (am) extremely grateful for his help. <3
We would love to bring on an icon artist for the in-game operating system, and a character writer. This would help us immensely with Career Mode, but there’s no hurry at all. If you like the idea of the game, and don’t mind volunteering some free time to help, feel free to get in touch - if you’d like. ritchie@sociallydistantgame.com
We’d also like to start private play-testing of Career Mode as its development continues. If you applied last year, you do not need to apply again - we’re lookin’ there first. Playtesters get access to the game on Steam for the duration of their role as a playtester.
Backups, backups, backups!
This site, the game’s code, and pretty much everything else important about the game, is hosted on GitLab EE off the cloud. This is great, until there’s a hardware failure in my ancient 10-year-old gaming PC that I repurposed as a GitLab server, or until there’s an act of deity in the direct area of my house.
We’ll be setting up read-only mirrors of the game’s coe an other repositories; to both GitHub and Codeberg. Contributions and issues should be directed to the GitLab, as we will not actively monitor the other repositories.
Patreon content
We’re going to continue monthly devlogs, even if we’ve been slacking off lately.
We’d also like to start showing early gameplay footage and other exclusive dev content on Patreon. This could include future soundtrack previews as well.
Store Page launch on Steam
We have been sitting on the store page for over a year, waiting to finally set it live. When we do, we’d love a wishlist or two. <3
Store pages generally have lots of graphic assets, and I am blind. We could use all the help we could get for that.
Along with store page launch, we’d like to look at implementing Steam Workshop support. Modders would be able to create custom missions, NPC encounters, entire stories, and theme the in-game OS. We love hacking games that let you customize the in-game experience, this would go a long way.
Story writing
We’d like to subtly rethink the game’s story. The core concept of Socially Distant will remain the same, but the player’s role in the story will change and will be better-explained. More details in the future, though.
What we think we can manage
Here’s a table. Organized by season. Winter represents the start of the year, each season lasts 3 months.
| Winter | Spring | Summer | Autumn |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hacking: Get a shell on an NPC’s system. | First Career missions | World-building | Demo preparation |
| Window themes | Career Asset bundle | Wayland CSD support | Workshop integration |
| Repo mirrors | In-game music | UI animations | Store Page launch |
| Code documentation | Tracer | Hex Viewer | Text Editor |
Some stretch goals:
- New OS/app icons
- Reveal trailer
- Audio visualizer backdrops
- Interactive music
So that’s basically it.
I’ve never done a roadmap for any of my projects before. Well, except for now. It probably isn’t perfect, but it’s a start.
Over the next few weeks, we’ll be fleshing this out and setting up trackable milestones and tasks on GitLab.
For now, we wish everybody happy holidays and a happy new year. And we’ll be waiting.