The character animation and control will be more as you described by the time Town Square comes around. It will follow the player only when a weapon is drawn, otherwise the head will move without the body. I forget the name of the systems off hand, but the computer UI is based off real police systems. It's a blend of two, one called iforce and another which escapes me.

You can restrain people who surrender to you if you have zipties. You can then toss them in a vehicle. You can also call the police if you like. Identity is about freedom, and this is the sort of thing that's possible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorem_ipsum Yes, you'll be able to play as both male and female.

While Identity will have microtransactions, they're entirely cosmetic or low-impact. By this I mean items which will not give you a competitive advantage. We're not selling good vehicles for real money. If you look at those currently for sale, you'll notice they're all toward the low end. The advantage is only for the early game; when you first start playing you'll have an easier time getting around. However, after playing a while you'll move on to bigger and better things which you purchase with game currency. We're extremely careful here in that powerful items will never, ever, be sold for real money. Apartments will only be sold for some areas of the world, mostly in large cities, using microtransactions. They're also unlimited in availability and mostly social in nature. They can function as storage, which is their only advantage, but that's precisely why they're not located in areas near important resources. This is something we take VERY seriously and we're being quite careful about how they're implemented. These microtransactions are designed to make your first days more convenient, but in no way will someone who spends more real money ever have a competitive advantage.

Your apartment in Town Square will come with such things, and they'll be placable in the environment where you choose much the same way as you'd place down furniture.

Happy Holidays From Asylum! The holidays are upon us, and the team at Asylum begins their short rest! We've been busier than ever, and this coming January is shaping up to be one of our biggest months in a very long time, if not ever. Our expanded team has been working hard on game features beyond the Town Square, and you're finally going to be getting a glimpse of true Identity gameplay very soon in the new year; that's just the start. Keeping it Real Primary systems in Identity such as weapons and vehicles are being developed to operate as realistically as possible. Last week a few of the developers braved the freezing temperatures at a local range to record audio directly from a slew of real firearms in all sorts of conditions. It's very important to us that the weapons in Identity look, sound and react as close to reality as possible. We've even modeled the ballistic physics based on real-world mathematical formulas. Powerful weapons are going to be rare in Identity. Assault weapons, for example, will likely be used in major circumstances. For the most part players will have access to less powerful weaponry; melee, hand guns, hunting rifles, and so on will be the norm. Here it Comes! With the Town Square development moving along, we're not far off from showing the world real Identity gameplay! Like I said up there, January is going to be a big month. For us in the studio, we're excited to get our hands on a few new technology demos that might have a huge impact on Identity! For our fans, January is going to be the month you see the first true world gameplay video. Not only that, but soon after we're looking to release a Town Square trailer! Keep your eyes out on Identity's Twitter and Facebook. The Twitch Clips If you've been following Identity's development closely, you probably already know that developers stream their work live on the Identity Twitch channel every Tuesday and Thursday (except on this coming week due to holidays). We also use that time to answer almost every question that gets asked about Identity's development and gameplay. Now that we've been doing this a while, we've answered a lot of questions. Our awesome community manager, BeachBall, has taken the time to compile a massive list of questions linked to clips where they're answered by a developer. Get comfy and head over to the Twitch Clips Directory forum thread. If you haven't found this already, be prepared to spend a good bit of time listening to all sorts of awesome information. This is the best place to get to know the fine details Identity! -- John VanderZwet

And you should, given that we have never said that it'll be released before the new year. This is our final week in the office before we're off for the holidays and the video content is almost ready to go, so we're still pushing hard to get it out right away. That said, you'll most likely be seeing it first thing in the new year. We'll go into this more in the next dev blog on Friday!

We hope so, but we don't know for sure. It's a little tight in that there's only a week and a half before the guys are on a short break for the holidays, but they're hard at work!

Family matters It was just a month ago that we announced the official release date for the Town Square module. Since then, we've been hard at work turning that promise into a reality. Team expansions, UI drama, family additions and a whole new Unreal Engine amounted into a crazy time! For me, the biggest news this month was the arrival of my second beautiful daughter, Aria, on the 19th. It's been a lot of fun and not as sleepless as I expected. It meant a week off for me although the team in the office hadn't skipped a single beat while I was away. My week away was the first week of work for two new developers here at the office. Andrew (McWOLF), a gameplay programmer, and Artur (Archer), a UI/UX designer and developer have joined the team. Both have already proven themselves to be great at what they do! You've got questions, they've got answers Identity's community members and YouTubers have interviewed the developers. Your questions have been asked; check it out to see what the developers say about the way Identity is played! IDENTITY RPG DEVELOPER Q&A NOVEMBER, 2017 Identity Game - Podcast - Developer Q&A - #2 Join us on Twitch at 4PM EST on Tuesdays and Thursdays to watch Identity's developers at work. Most of these streams also have other developers present to answer the questions of those watching, live! Are you interested in hearing answers to other questions? Our developers have been answering questions on live streams for some time now and Brandon (BeachBall), our community manager, has compiled an enormous list of questions and answers. Check out the TWITCH CLIPS DIRECTORY forum thread. The little engine that couldn't We're really excited to show you gameplay footage, not only of the Town Square module but what you can expect to see beyond the modules! We've been hard at work on this, but our aging build of the Unreal Engine just couldn't cope with the advanced vehicle physics systems we're implementing in Identity! This meant it was time for the dreaded engine merge, something our lead programmer Sone has been fearing for years! Every once in a while (usually every year or so) we have to merge all of the modifications we've made to the core Unreal Engine into the latest release. It's an absolutely enormous undertaking, but it's done and good to go. Now that we're running the latest version of the engine, we can support more advanced technologies and we can bring you a more immersive experience, even in the Town Square. Just wait 'til you see what we're doing with vehicles! The UI disaster! Early in the month we hit a road-block. Our licensed middleware system for the user interface in Identity, Scaleform, was discontinued! The industry leading system would be no more, and we had to make the tough decision to abandon it now to save grief in the future. It was like a slap in the face. All of our user interface code had to be scrapped and replaced! While Scaleform was a Flash based system, our new UI would not be. We've signed on with Coherent Labs, and the new UI is under way. While unexpected, it's actually a blessing in disguise! Our new Coherent system allows for faster development, and while it's a minor setback now it'll speed things up considerably going forward. Our new guy, Artur, is dedicated to the user interface in Identity and our UI will be stronger now because of it. With Artur's help, I don't expect this to affect development time for Town Square even at all. We have more hands on deck to cover the added work. On the horizon With our expanding development team, we're able to focus our efforts in more areas of Identity's development. With vehicle and weapon systems now getting attention, we're once again progressing towards a short but feature packed gameplay video for you guys to check out. Keep your eyes out on Identity's Twitter and Facebook! -- John VanderZwet

I'm always impressed by the art produced by the Identity team! That talent is pretty undeniable.

You'll find board games and more in Identity. In fact you might even find a chess board in the town square if time permits.

The current upkeep time is set to 1 month and it applies only to houses, not apartments.

Our reasoning for this is that we don't want people who can afford to buy apartment spaces through microtransactions to have an advantage in the game. If you were able to rent out the apartments, which you may have gotten through a pledge/MT, you could then translate that into in-game currency through rental income. We've got to consider all angles to make sure everything remains as fair and balanced as possible. You can have multiple people living in an apartment, though! And you can have more than one apartment for access to your stuff in different areas of the world.

Poking @BentBot! He's our web guy. He's in yelling range of me but it's easier to just do this because lazy.

Since I might have re-railed things just a bit, I'll give you a more serious response! You will, definitely, see tasers and shotguns in Identity. There will be several less-than-lethal weapons available.

Is it, though? Is it?!

It seems like your one problem might not be much of a problem after all. In Identity, it's mostly just low influence (mostly cosmetic) items which cannot be lost. Things like your debit card, your clothing, and so on. Items which don't give you a strength but instead offer convenience. Most other things can indeed be lost. If you die out in the woods because you thought you could fist fight a bear then you might not have lost much, as there's a good chance you could get back to that place before everything despawns. When someone else is around though, they can loot your corpse and take what's dropped. This is mostly an issue of convenience, and we go for a balance of such versus risk. We fully understand that for life to be exciting, death has to be scary. At the same time, why make people go back to their closet and change their outfit over and over again?

In the earliest days of Identity's release, most people will likely start with bicycles for transportation. The bicycles can, for the most part, hold only a single person and are clearly not as quick as a motorized vehicle. They also don't have trunk space. Now imagine trying to make some early dollars by doing odd jobs around town. Gathering, delivery tasks, and so on will be a lot easier if you can both get around quicker and carry larger hauls.

About 1,600 sqft. Not huge but large enough to house our team with some room to grow. People in Ottawa will be free to schedule a drop by and meet the team once things are going.

The office looks great, but it's more of a budget space than it looks. I've been busy there for weeks as I assembled all the furniture, cut and hung the decor.. we've saved a lot of money by doing everything ourselves. In fact, we're a very frugal bunch and our funding is quite healthy.

Yep. Read the summary near the end. I explained that.

That's right. The proximity voice system in Identity is fairly advanced. Walls and such between your head and the speaker's head will affect the sound. Furthermore, there are devices (loud speakers, microphones, etc) that can affect how far your voice can travel.

As @Villasenor mentioned, it really depends on the server. On official servers, with the stress system enabled and at default settings, that depends on their current stress level. On private servers, which can completely disable the stress mechanic, a headshot from most calibers will likely result in death.

This month in development Another month and another dev blog to keep you updated! I want to start this one by giving a thank you to everyone who's receiving this blog post by email, our backers who are making Identity a reality. It's an exciting time as our team is growing and our pace quickening as a result. Identity's beginning to get more exposure and every pledge we receive helps us produce content faster. It's been slower than we'd like in the past because our team has been tiny, but this growth we're seeing as of late has been opening doors and propelling us forward. As of this month we've now raised over $700,000 USD; a large amount of money and what we've needed to bring on more talent. Talent we've lost to other studios and existing contracts in the past, some of our absolute best, is now returning to Asylum Entertainment to work on Identity full-time. We're really looking forward to the work from those being added to our roster, which will result in more clothing options as well as much prettier environments. We're also looking to pick up another programmer and a new community manager very shortly, to improve our PR situation and give you guys a more transparent view into development. Case variations for one of three phones in Identity With our art team growing with top industry talent, we're also making some good progress in content programming. Our elevator system has been finalized after being re-hashed. This elevator system is used in the Town Square, and throughout Identity where apartments exist, to bring players up to their lofted homes. The interesting part is these function like real elevators, and you'll see other players in them going to and from their floors. They act as loading zones, so instead breaking your immersion with a loading screen we load the apartment and it's customizations in the background while you ride the elevator. By the time the door opens everything's in place and you don't even notice that you've moved into a special instance of the world. Art of the Town Square When creating new environments, we first have our concept artist draw up a layout and artistic design. From there, environment artists create the 3D assets from that piece and a level designer places them in the world you inhabit. We're pleased to have our incredibly talented concept artist, Alexander, back in full-swing as we prepare the final pieces of environment necessary for the Town Square. Clothing store concept; hotel and art gallery in rear The clothing store is interesting in Town Square because it's operating on a system we've created for many computer-controlled shops in Identity. It has a fully functioning shoplifting mechanic. In most games you walk up to an NPC (non-player character) and interact to purchase items. You then simply walk away with your items. Stores in Identity are a different story, and are unique in the gaming world. You'll add items from racks and shelves to your cart. You can then walk into the dressing room to preview those items (assuming it's clothing) or walk up to the register to pay. What if you don't pay and simply walk out the door with your cart? Shoplifting is a reality in Identity, although it's often not recommended. If you're not skilled, and most people won't be, you'll set off alarms and have a hard time getting away. You'll likely spend time in jail for the attempt. Expensive items can also not be shoplifted for game balance purposes. Even something so simple as using a shop gives freedom and oppportunity not found in any game before. Last month we showed you a bicycle which will be ridable in Identity. Below you'll see the bicycle shop concepts for the Town Square. While you won't be able to ride them in Town Square, you'll be able to browse many options which will be available to you. Bicycle shop concept for the Ash Hill town square These final two interiors are being created by our artists as we speak, and are the last environments required for Town Square's release, along with some minor systems programming and polish. Art gallery/library concept art, previously shown Art gallery and library in-game, without player art The near future One of our top priorities right now is to give all of you who have been waiting a glimpse of real gameplay in a video. Identity's funding and progress has exploded since we showed you the workings of the housing and apartment systems on YouTube, and now we want you to see vehicles, drug production and weapon systems. I can't promise any dates on this video, but it'll be soon. In fact, I expect you to watch this video before you receive the next dev blog. This coming video is sort of a catalyst, and I can't wait to show you what's in store after it. The Town Square is also getting near the point where we're going to be able to start showing off videos of the gameplay elements you'll find within it, leading up to the public release of the module. These videos will be coming after the previously mentioned video. We do regret how little we've been able to show you thus far. We're a tiny team stretching a small budget to its limits, so things take some time. Now that much of the core exists and other supporting pieces are falling into place, I'm excited that we're now really making progress that can be witnessed. -- John VanderZwet