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Physio

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Play as a physionomist in a fractured society undergoing multiple crises. Face the dangers of nightlife, take on increasingly risky contracts, build a solid reputation with clubs, and buy equipment to secure a better future.

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DevNotes #4 | The Smartphone Update & Demo Overhaul

Mar 18

Hey everyone! 👋

Hope you're all doing great since the last update! Today, I’m thrilled to walk you through a major evolution of the Physio demo based on your incredible feedback.

📈 Feedback After the First Release

Releasing the demo to the public was a massive milestone for me. It validated two big things:

The Concept Works: People get the vibe! It’s clear the game uses discrimination as a mechanic for dark humor without intending harm, and most importantly, you guys found it funny!
Gameplay Needed Depth: While the core was fun, the ID interaction was a bit too simple and got repetitive quickly. You wanted more variety and a clearer picture of what the full game will offer. I heard you loud and clear

📱 Your New Best Friend: The Smartphone

To add depth without cluttering the screen with a heavy HUD, I’ve introduced a smartphone. Since we all know how to navigate apps and menus in real life, it makes the UI feel natural and intuitive (which is a relief for me, as UI/UX isn’t my strongest suit!)

VerifID App

The manual ID check has been completely overhauled. In the world of Physio, bouncers use the VerifID app to access the government database via biometrics.

Snap a Photo: You’ll need to take a picture of the NPC to pull their official data
Do the Math: I’ve removed the automatic age helper! You’ll now need to compare the ID's birthdate against the current date displayed on your phone to see if they’re legal

Side Note: Strangely enough, right after I started working on this, a news article popped up in France about the police using a very similar biometric app. Talk about odd timing! It’s a bit unsettling in reality, but it fits our game world perfectly

Club DB

This app is your connection to the venue. It tracks:

Reservations & Blacklists: Know exactly who is welcome and who is banned
VIP Tracking: Get the heads-up on high-profile guests or politicians to avoid any "diplomatic incidents" at the door

Party Rules

Forget memorizing everything! This app lists every rule for your shift. If you’re ever in doubt, just tap a rule to see exactly how to apply it during your checks

🪪 Redesigned Identity Cards

The ID cards have been graphically and functionally reworked!

Visual Polish: The design is now inspired by the French national ID with a generic European Union twist
Manual Comparison: Fields are no longer interactive. You won’t just click on text; you’ll have to manually compare the physical card against the data on your smartphone screen

🎓 Tutorial Rework: Freedom to Fail

I’ve redesigned the tutorial to give you more agency. Instead of forcing you down a narrow path, I’m now letting you make mistakes and notifying you afterward. During internal playtests, players loved the "freedom to mess up" much more than being handheld

And for those of you frustrated that you can’t beat everyone up yet, hang tight! It’s just the tutorial. You’ll have plenty of chances for chaos in the full game.

🛠️ Small Tweaks, Big Impact

The Stamina Bar

To give you more control during combat, I’ve added a dedicated Stamina Bar! This provides much-needed clarity on how to manage your energy and pace yourself during fights

Kaso vs. The CCTV

I’ve made the tough decision to scale back Kaso’s role. Even though he’s honestly quite funny, he was becoming a bit too invasive and taking up too much space.

The security cameras are now taking the lead for intel! Kaso will still help you out in the early stages, but moving toward a CCTV-focused system feels more grounded and closer to the actual bouncer experience you'll have in the full game.

👤 Personal Feeling

I haven't had much of a chance to share this yet, but that first demo release was a life-changing milestone for me. For the first time, total strangers were playing my game, complimenting it, criticizing it, and genuinely having fun. As a solo dev, balancing a full-time job, my physical training, and a social life while rushing toward this release has been an uphill battle. I’ve had to make many sacrifices and spend months explaining to friends and family why I’ve been "off the grid" to make this happen.

Seeing the wishlist grow and watching streamers laugh along with their chats makes every late night worth it. Thank you so much for playing, for the feedback, and for adding Physio to your wishlist. It truly means the world to me and every other indie dev out there grinding to bring their ideas to life.

☝️ One More Thing...

I’m excited to tell you that multiplayer is officially on the horizon!

I can’t wait to see how you and your friends handle things together (or just get into double the trouble).

See you soon! Thanks for all the support and keep that feedback coming!

Physio

DevNotes #3 | First internal test

Jan 24

Hey ! 👋

Long time no see huh ?

No worries, I'm still working hard on the game !

This post should have been published over a month ago, but I've been busy elsewhere. I'm posting it anyway, and other posts will follow with the latest news 😁

Steam Next Fest

Very important news: I asked for a review of a stable build to Steam team. So if everything is ok, a demo of the game will be available at the February Steam Next Fest 🥳🎉

🥊 New Fighting Systems

I'm glad to introduce you the new fighting system with fresh animations, VFX and sound design.

There is still some polishing left, but it should be enough for the upcoming demo.

New mechanics have been introduced such as :

🎯 Hit zones: your hit direction, type (jab, hook), and target location (head, torso) now trigger specific impact animations and affect the damage you deal. Pro tip: always aim for the head !
⚡ Low stamina effect: if you lack stamina, your damage can drop up to 50%, and your movement speed will also decrease
🤩 Feedback system: stamina is indicated through sound design (your character will breath loudly) and through visual effects (your vision will be less clear). Player's health is shown via a basic red vignette that intensifies when you're low hp
💀 Player's death: dying animation has been added where time will slow down and your character will close its eyes slowly
🧠 AI fighting logic: Enemies now react to your health, stamina, and other variables to adjust their aggressiveness. They can coordinate movements to avoid blocking each other while attacking you. They’re also capable of surrounding you, but I disabled that for now because it’s completely unbalanced. Fighting is meant to be difficult, not impossible. I need more time to tune this correctly
😱 AI Fear level: during fights, enemies now have a fear value that can cause them to back away or flee when things turn bad. This system still needs some tweaking
💪 Players hit combo: All your attacks can now hit multiple targets. Be careful not to hit the wrong person unless you want to make the situation worse. Front kicks now apply knockback, and your combo speed increases depending on the fighting classes you’ve purchased in the shop 💲

I added a lot of safe guards in their behaviors to avoid most of soft blocks. I'm currently still hesitating to add a similar teleport fallback to NPCs similar to Half Life 2 to avoid soft blocks in their movements. I'm pretty to sure to add it in the official release of the game, but for the demo, it would be a waste of time.

Dialogues

I spent a lot of times to add more dialogues lines in the game. And it still not enough to cover all dialogue cases.

This is one of the biggest headaches I had in this game development. It has been designed to almost fully works via a json file containing most of lines and conditions to be triggered. Most of the necessary code is done via the player choices that must trigger specific things depending on the context (show ID card, show customer pockets, etc).

Also, the UI/UX has been revisited to make the lines more visible and readable.

Menus

The main game menu is simple for now. I prepared a basic ambience for the demo, and I hope to polish it later.

Most menus are now functional: You can access the shop, select jobs, and manage your expenses through a simple and clean interface. It’s a bit dark visually, in my opinion, but everything works properly. UI polishing will come after the demo release.

Musics

New musics have been added and everyone of them have been composed by myself ! It's a mix between techno basses and synthwave. I hope you'll like it !

Settings Page with key binding

The settings page is now available both in the main menu and during missions.

You can edit graphics quality, rebind keyboard controls, and change the language.

Dressing System

I've never talked about this system before, but it exists since a long time in the game source code. But now that I've added more clothes models and textures to the characters, we are starting to see how it works.
There is colors flagged as "atypical" (pink, purple, ...), some flagged as "typical" (black, white, dark blue), and the others.
It's capable of addressing a number of color the ped will use to dress.
The probability to wear a specific color type, or a certain number of color is evaluated depending on the club event.
I'll add more detail about the probabilities in the section below 👇
This feature has been developed to force the player to analyze peds clothes and reject them if it does not fit the club policy.

📊 Statistics and balancing

An important feature incorporated in Physio is procedural events. This section is very important due to the trickiness of procedurality. It can quickly be a pain in the ass if it's not balanced correctly. You can't just put a percentage of chances to occur and pray to have a balanced game. You need to evaluate them to keep some control in the chaos. Otherwise, the game can be unplayable by having a lot of bad events chained too quickly, or it can be boring because nothing happens for a long time. To avoid this situation, I had to use a fabulous concept in mathematics, statistics and probabilities. I've made multiple excel sheets that evaluate the probabilities of multiple events and parameters to occur. Most of the calculations are quite easy to evaluate due to their consistency or linearity. For the dressing system, each time we spawn a ped of specific gender, skin color and other parameters, it determines a precise percentage of chances to have x color of pants. But some features increase the complexity of probabilistic assessments such as the ped spawning logic due to its rush hour system. \[Insert ped spawning curve] In the picture above, this is a curve representing ped spawning frequency over time. By looking at it, it's immediately clear that the frequency of appearance is not constant, or linear because the curve doesn’t looks like a straight line. It looks like a bell and it’s more commonly called a gaussian curve, or a normal curve. It respects the normal distribution logic. In order to estimate the average number of peds that will spaw during a game session can be calculated thanks to integrals. It’s quite easy to do it on paper, but less for me to do it on excel due to my lack of knowledge of this software. So, to avoid spending days to understand how to use gaussian error function in excel, and still have a quite good estimation, I simply estimate dx by using the trapezoidal rule. Because Physio is not a massive multiplayer game with the ambition to be a competitive game, I can tolerate the lack of precision this calculation method have. Now that I have the estimation of ped spawned per game session, I can easily calculate the frequencies of other parameters (gender, clothes, peds characteristics, …).

A lot more is coming very soon! 💪
I look forward to hearing your feedback in a few weeks at Steam Next Fest 🎉🎉

Physio

DevNotes #2 | Almost ready for first internal test

Feb 27, 2025

Hello everyone !

New UI for dialogues 💬

As with every rework, it has led to other redesigns, such as a complete overhaul of the input system.
In most of video games, the same input often has different contextual uses. For example, pressing the 'W' key in the menu moves up the selected UI component, while pressing the same key outside the menus moves the character forward. As the number of game contexts increases with the addition of more sub-activities (driving, fishing, discussing, etc.), a cleaner solution was needed to manage the consequences of pressing a button.
a way to organize the source code so input interpretation can be easily switched. For example, when the player is loaded into the game, the gameplay input logic is active, so pressing the left click throws a jab. However, when the player starts a dialogue, the dialogue input logic is loaded, making the left click skip the current dialogue line.
This implementation took me a while to set up, but I'm sure it will save me headaches in the future. This new system also lays the groundwork for supporting Joy-Cons in the near future.

New identity card 🛂

The UX of controlling ped's identity has been reworked. I've decided to integrate ID Cards as an interactive 3D object. You'll be able to hover fields on the card such as the first name, last name, birthday, ethnicity, ... Clicking on them will ask directly a question to the ped controlled to verify the information and ensure it's not fake.
There's more to say about this feature, but to avoid spoilers, I'll stop here 😢.

Woman finally added 🙋‍♀️

I finally managed to motivate myself to finalize the female model. I've used the male model as a base for it, which saved me a lot of time in designing it.
Honorable mention to my friend Alexis, who advised me to use the same rig as the male model to reuse the same animations for both male and female models. The time saved by such advice is tremendous, thank you again Alexis ❤️

New props 3d models 📱

To complete the mechanic of "Checking Ped Pockets" feature, I've finally added new props models for drugs (weed, hash and MDMA).
A walkie-talkie has been also added in the game. But I'll explain its purpose in the next DevNote.

Peds height 📏

Peds' height now directly impacts their scale in-game. In the first draft, I decided to randomize peds heights. But the result gave me a strange visual effect. The reason is that, in real life, the distribution of people's height respects the gaussian law, which wasn't the case with my approach of height fully randomized. So I've implemented a fake normal height distribution by using the Box-Muller transform formula. The result is much more immersive, even if it it seems like a minor detail.

New animations 🤸‍♂️

I've also added discussion animations for when peds talk to each other in the waiting queue, making the world feel more alive. The addition of these animations, along with bystanders hanging around in the street, has helped create a real atmosphere. Sometimes, I just want to leave the game running, listen to lofi, and watch them walk around and chat.
A wider range of animations would be nice, but that'll have to wait until the polish stage of development.

Ambient sound 🔊

The first pass on in-game audio has been made.
I've created two initial drafts of the peds' voices, and the second proposal was more promising.
The first approach was similar to "Animal Crossing" voices, but the main problem was that the sounds became unbearable when a crowd of 20 peds started talking at the same time in the queue.
So, my second approach is more similar to Simlish in "The Sims". The fact that they speak real words helps create a hubbub effect when you're near a crowd of peds talking. I like the current solution, but due to time constraints, they only pronounce 15 words in a loop. I need more time to refine the language, but it already sounds pretty good.
I hope to bring you more updates on this subject in the next DevNote.

That’s all for this DevNote, progress has been exciting, but my main focus now is preparing for the first internal tests.
There’s still plenty to do, but those steps brings the game closer to a solid first playable version.
Until next time, take care ☀️

Physio

Demo

i spent 45 mins trying this demo. there's always good and bad. the pink light you're forced to stand in front of makes it extremely hard to make out the holograms, unless my eyesight if getting fd. also, i don't really understand the signs of people under drugs. i only missed one after the prompts stopped but i still don't really get it. again, maybe it's the lighting. otherwise, i really liked the game, aside from the fist fighting. but, i'm sure that gets much easier once you can purchase stuff. excited...

Pnuttgoes

Mar 1 @ 9:02pm

General Discussions

Language support

It's a really fun game. Any plans to add more languages or hiring translator?

uncut

Feb 24 @ 2:37am

General Discussions

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