Second Half Games

FSH #62 — TGIFSH

2026-04-10T16:00:00Z

Happy Friday! April is in full swing. Every day is a new season, with its own opportunities and pitfalls.

Who cares! I'll tell you what season it is: gaming season.

It's always gaming season at Second Half.

Last week, much like rocket science, things went up and things went down!

Yeah, that's topical. That's like a roundabout Artemis mention. Print that.

This week, we got that dawg in us.

You Can't Pet This Dog

Well, maybe you can, but it's not gonna be easy! Horrible things are happening in our enemy R&D department as we continue to shift away from the previous crab-based enemies to a new form of dog-shaped killer robots.

Coming with a variety of ranged and melee options, the Def-Seculabs Bulldog Laser-and-Melee Model (BLAMM for short) is the answer to all your futuristic junkyard security needs, because even far-off junkyards in the distant future need them dogs.

Dog? Rabbit? VOTE NOW!

Second Half is proud to be part of the long-running video game tradition of enemies that are just over waist height and run at you while making scary noises.

Tuning the Tuned Mass Damper

Jon's done some more work on the tuned mass damper room and our elevator, adding first pass textures while Lucien's tweaked our lighting and shadows.

But who tunes the tuners?

There's a joke in there somewhere about tunerfsh, but I don't know if it's funny enough for me to make it.

Looking Ahead

Florida IX is getting shelved for real next week as we plot a new course to the Interchange Transit Yards! We also inch ever closer to the inevitable friends and family Alpha testing...

All change please!

FSH #61 — Target Acquired

2026-03-27T16:00:00Z

Happy Friday! Yeah, that's right — we release our newsletters on FRIDAY now. The F stands for FRIDAY.

We value our weekends here at Second Half, and also we now get to call the newsletter the "fish."

We're keeping the numbers though. I'm not changing that count — especially when we've got some very funny 60-somethings to look forward to.

Last week, things got hot and dangerous.

This week, we're homing in on and hitting our targets.

Florida IX, Sharper Then Ever Before!

With only one week left on our timeline before we're pushed off this iteration of Florida IX and move onto our next map, our trash world is looking great!

There's still a bit of greybox, but generally things are textured and looking the way they need to.

Nice 'N' Tidy were hard at work until the very end.

Work continues on decorating interior spaces, making our abandoned structures feel lived-in.

The old office lobby's looking the quietest it's been for a while...

Jon's also finished up a shiny new glass elevator. This is the "junior executive" model, offering unparalleled social and spatial mobility.

Going up!

We got to ride around in it during our playtest today. The glass panels give you a peek at the building's tuned mass damper, specially engineered to keep the building stable during pesky trash-quakes.

So that's why the building's still standing after all these years!

Terrific Turrets Target, Tackle Troublesome Trespassers!

We showed them off a couple of weeks ago, but the turrets are now implemented and causing chaos!

That's the beep-beep-beep-POW of safety you're hearing.

Lilith's done a fantastic job on them, alongside reworking a whole portion of our enemy AI for better telegraphing and aiming behaviour.

Turrets can also be tied to activatable doors and elevators, forcing the player into situations where they must clear a room before advancing, or even folding out of the ceiling behind you when you least expect it for a nasty surprise.

Looking Ahead

Soon, it will be Easter! We're all looking forward to a long weekend. We're also excited to crack on with our next map concept on the lava planet of Reason!

SSH #60 — In Transit

2026-03-14T16:00:00Z

Happy Saturday!

Last week, we continued to be open about our communication. We also promoted healthy habits. Clean your desk or the trash pile that consumes us all will get you next.

This week, work continued on Florida IX, and early design happened for our next planet: Reason.

Reason. It's Hot Out There.

Following the total ecological (and, for insurance purposes, corporately unavoidable) collapse of Florida IX, someone had to clean up the mess. Ideally, someone who did not need food and did not care about silly things like "a safe work environment" or "a work-life balance."

Nobody was better suited for the job than the industrial supercomputer now known as The Forgemaster. Programmed with one thing in mind: maximum industrial output, using recycled materials from abandoned/failed colonial ventures in SECTOR 80.

The plan? Turn waste into workforce. Melt down and refine all reusable components from the Florida IX metamaterial disaster and make them into a neverending swarm of scavenger and construction robots, all handled by a super-genius central planning robot. Profit.

What could go wrong?

Our original concept for The Forgemaster's lair, which will be reified soon!

You mean they turned into a killer robot army almost immediately? Aw nuts.

Well, you better sneak into the heart of the Forgemaster's operation via some disused railway tunnels and see what you can do about it!

Also, Innovations in Death Machines and Corporate Security

Expanding our repertoire of robotic enemies, we give you the timeless classic of the laser turret.

Turning on the power in a facility might give you access to elevators and doors, but oh boy are you going to have to deal with the crotchety old residents!

Beep boop. Dual laser array. Beep boop.

It's all fun and games until you forget to update the targeting firmware for 70 years. Security through vapourisation.

Looking Ahead

We watched Annihilation today as a team and boy did it have some pretty colours.

All systems go for Florida IX on our next playtest Friday! Furthermore, we've done some concrete level concept work for Reason's Interchange Transit Yards.

SSH #59 — Neat 'n' Tidy Corporation

2026-03-07T16:00:00Z

Happy Saturday!

Last week, we came back alive and resumed public communication about this fun game we're working on, MEANWHILE IN SECTOR 80.

This week, we came together for a fantastic internal playtest featuring a chunk of the game's first level, the Florida IX Junkyard.

Florida IX, a Wondrous Place

Florida IX is the ninth planet in humankind's never-ending thirst for semi-tropical beachfront real estate. Though once beautiful, populous, and adored, Florida IX was overrun by the glacial advance of illegally dumped auto-expanding metamaterials.

The Florida IX we see in MS80 has been abandoned for several decades, and at this point, the entire surface of the planet is covered in a crust of refuse.

From last week's SSH; behold all of the trash!

You, the player, are dumped onto the planet by an autonomous trash ship to join the rest of the garbage that's already here.

Eventually, you make your way to the high-rise headquarters of the Neat 'n' Tidy Corporation, which is the focus of our most recent round of work and the center of this week's playtest!

When everyone else quit, Neat 'n' Tidy kept working when everyone else left.

We've got some real geometry, some textures starting to show up, and a whole lot more greybox level geometry that we played with!

Looking Ahead

A major feature we worked on this week, not pictured, was a huge revamp of the game's electrical system and enemy AI. We'll have more updates (and videos) showcasing all that soon!

Also up next week, we'll continue shaping Florida IX with the goal to have a mostly-realized version of the level by the middle of the month.

SSH #42 - #58 — Ground Control to Major Tom

2026-02-28T16:00:00Z

Happy Saturday!

We're still alive, sorry for the extended radio silence! We've had our heads down working and making sure we're organized and ready to get this game out into the world!

State of the Game

Since our last update in November, we've been taking inventory of where we're at and starting to build the shipping-quality content that we want to ship in the game.

We have a great plan and a solid roadmap for the production of the game leading into and beyond Early Access, and now we're executing on it!

Our level art is starting to close in on the style and quality we want for our Early Access launch. Here's part of the game's first level in its current state:

Welcome to Dowijuya, an up-and-coming neighborhood on beautiful Florida IX!

We're going to be starting playtesting in the next couple months, which is the next big milestone the team is building towards. If you'd like to be part of the first folks to see the game, join us on Discord and say hi!

Prior to our Early Access launch, we're also aiming to have a public demo available to participate in Steam Next Fest. More info to come later!

We've been working on making understanding power flow in the game easier; here's a prototype!

Our main goal is to launch into Early Access in Fall of 2026 and reach sustainability so that we can continue to make this game a reality.

New Team Members

During the last few months, we've also recruited some incredible new team members. Please give a warm welcome to all of them:

Jon

Jon joined the team in October of 2025 as an artist. He's an incredible artist with credits on games like Enter the Matrix, Torment: Tides of Numenéra, and Harry Potter: Quidditch Champions. We've been ecstatic to have Jon on the team!

Lilith

Lilith joined the team in November of 2025 as a programmer. She's been revamping our editor as well as our game mechanics and has an incredible feel for tuning and finding fun. She's quickly become the go-to problem solver on the team!

Harriet

Harriet joined the team in January of 2026 as a producer. She's a very organized, talented, and experienced producer. Harriet has done a fantastic job getting us into shape for our big release and everything that goes into it!

Looking Ahead

With this post, we're aiming to restart Saturday @ Second Half as a weekly tradition. I'm excited for the team to have an opportunity to share all the amazing things they've been creating on a regular basis!

Overall, the future is bright; make sure you have sunglasses!

SSH #37 - #41 — Spooky Holiday Special

2025-11-01T16:00:00Z

Happy Saturday! Happy Halloween!

I'm stuck in the terrible daylight savings time vortex again, so I don't know what time it is — but it's definitely still Saturday!

This update actually isn't very Halloween themed, it's just that October was a CRAZY month. For a very brief moment (about 8 days), 83.33% of the team were in the same city, before the laws of physics and an ancient curse tore them asunder once more.

The remaining team member (the talented Jon Gwyn) continued hammering away at the work completely unsupervised — bearing the weight of the world of MS80 on his shoulders like a modern Atlas. Not the geography book.

Such is the nature of remote work.

Second Half IRL 2025: Toronto

With remote work having the potential to leave people feeling isolated or not fully connected with their co-workers, Lucien decided it would be a good idea if everyone could get together and do something fun in a cool new place once every year! Think of it as "behavioural enrichment."

Toronto did not know what it was in for when the good people of Second Half were let loose on its streets and public transportation system. For just over a week, it was OUR city! No noodle bars, art galleries or escape rooms were safe.

A Second Half Sun sets on Toronto. Not pictured: the actual Second Half Team causing havoc.

My greatest takeaway from the entire Toronto adventure is that I've been lied to for years. Toronto in early October was warmer than an English summer (which in itself is like autumn warmed up), and after a few days we all started to feel a bit of the strain. I came back to England and told everyone I met, "Canada is actually warm." Everyone thinks I'm lying.

Lucien found the trip an almost transformative experience — especially the food! Pho, ramen, delicious sandwiches, great coffee, nice cake, Laotian food and mac & cheese! The people in Toronto really have it sorted out.

I asked Laura to give me a quote for this section. "I just live here." she said, which she does. She's lucky we don't all live there too. She was the best tour guide we could have ever asked for!

We also had the chance to see the beautiful Niagara Falls! And have a terrible time in a chain restaurant in a little town that might have actually been a bit of Hell sticking out of the ground.

The United States, as viewed from the Canadian side of Niagara Falls.

A Farewell and Thank You to Rasmus

During his time at Second Half, our resident maths wizard, mad scientist and hat-wearer, has meddled with affairs beyond the gaze of mortals. Mostly eldritch physics engine work, performance tweaks and electrical system iteration, but also devious traps that litter our levels.

I think my favourite thing of his still has to be his Takeshi's Castle/Wipeout contraption. That, and a certain railgun tripwire trap he made at the start of the year.

Bespoke home security.

Rasmus will now be moving onto bigger and better things as he continues on life's journey. We've been so grateful for all he's done in the year he's been with us, and are terrified of what further machinations he might get up to.

Brand New Environment Art!

While we were living the high life in Toronto, Jon was knee-deep in the art mines, creating new 3D assets that will transform the look of our game!

They're far more detailed and interesting than the basic walls and floors we've been using for a while, and we've got so many plans for how to use them and how we might make different kits for different planets and levels.

Part of a garage mockup scene Jon has been using to test the new kit.

The current goal is to design these with a very hot volcanic planet in mind — one that's been taken over by heavy industry and almost cracked like an egg! More on this later.

New rails for moving cranes and droppers!

Looking Ahead

Besides dealing with the effect of daylight savings time ending and throwing all of our scheduling out the window, the next big goal is continued character work and a start on texturing! I've got a lot of worldbuilding I've been putting together, and we'll be having a big meeting this week to talk about it.

We still haven't got round to watching WALL-E.

November will likely be the last full month of work for us in 2025, as December heralds horse-themed mischief. Horseplay, even.

SSH #36 — Rigor Vitae

2025-09-27T16:00:00Z

Happy Saturday!

Last week, Harry took us all on a tour of the gorgeous garbeaches of Florida IX!

This week, we've been working on making enemies. Not in real life, but in our video game. You know, MEANWHILE IN SECTOR 80.

Cycles: The Enemy Sprint

Here at Second Half Games, we use a process called "cycles" where we pick a major topic every week for everyone on the team to work on. We make a plan on Monday, do it during the week, then talk about how it went on the following Monday.

I can tell what you're about to say. You're going to say "those are Sprints" or "that's Agile"; you probably believe in "delivering shareholder value" and "achieve quarterly OKRs" and — ... and — ... uhh — ...

Sorry! I think my brain short-circuited. It's important that we don't use the S word here at Second Half. We're much happier for it. They're Cycles. They go in a big document we call The Cycloplan. It's a good process, sir.

Everything we did this week was part of the cycle known as Enemy Sprint III! Read on, my fellow human, and see what that included.

The Crabs are Deprecated— Laura

For several months, we've been using a standard "crab bot" frame that Eryn built as the foundation for all of our enemies:

There is only one step, and it IS crab.

They've served us faithfully! These bots were our first fully modular enemies with detatchable parts, a built-in power source, and our patent-denied polymorphic Slap-Any-Part-On-It AI.

That said, the crab bots have some critical flaws:

They're low to the ground. This makes them hard to shoot, gives them clearance problems, and makes their silhouette awkward.
They have a very limited range of motion to emote and signal state. With only four joints and stubby legs, their center of mass can't shift much!
They don't have enough fun parts to shoot off!

As part of Enemy Sprint III, Laura made a bunch of new enemy blockouts to experiment with!

Come visit the new KILLER ROBOT SHOWROOM, only here in KELLOGG, IDAHO!

The new enemies are already a hit with the team! They're a lot of fun to build with and I'm excited to see how they feel once we texture, rig, and animate our favorites!

Behavior Trees— Lucien

I've written a decent chunk of the code for MS80. That's included rendering, physics, editor tools, asset pipelines, and a bunch more. Games take a lot of different kinds of code!

...but I have to come clean. Up until this week, I honestly had no idea how to build good enemy AI in a game.

We've been sorta skating by with a handful of rat's nest state machines but it's been a constant pain point whenever we need to add new features to our enemies. Given the number of parts and situations that enemies can be in, the state of things was crushing my soul.

This week, a friend of mine mentioned Behavior Trees. I'd heard about them, but whenever I hear a Proper Noun Programming Term, all of my muscles tense up. Someone once whispered "Dynamic Programming" in my ear and I reflexively jumped out the window.

This time, after picking the shards of glass out of my skin, I sat down and actually tried making a bonafide Behavior Tree™.

Man discovers fire

Yeah, alright, they're really good. It's easy to do sequences of actions and to add new stuff. There are some shortcomings with regards to transitions and dynamic prioritization but those things are solvable.

Our implementation isn't anything special. We compose them with code instead of doing it visually. I wrote a couple little debugging tools for inspecting the state of the tree:

good enough for government work

The result is that we've now got enemies with much more interesting behaviors! Here's the new BT-based robot agent using one of Laura's early enemy blockouts:

Early days, but I'm giddy at the promise!

how is robbot formed?— Harry

Since the dawn of time, we've been missing an answer for one of the fundamental questions of the (game lore) universe: why is Sector 80 full of angry robots that stand around, waiting for their chance to kill you?

This week, Harry has gotten that all sorted!

It's a wonderful tale of political intrigue, corporate espionage, star-crossed lovers, and a surprising number of impromptu musical performances. We're trying to land Lin-Manuel Miranda for that last part but he hasn't been returning my calls.

Nobody at Second Half is under NDA; we keep things secret for the love of the game.

What? Did you think I was going to actually tell you about it? Nope! It's not time yet. In the writing biz, they call this "suspense" and it means you'll have to keep reading these newsletters.

Besides writing, Harry has also been starting to rig up encounters involving locking the player in a room with a bunch of enemies. Two robots enter, one robot leaves!

Chicken tenders for dinner.

Looking Ahead

We played Oxygen Not Included as a team on Friday. ONI is one of my favorite games and it's extremely relevant. Everyone seems to have had a great time! It also seems to have one shot at least one member of our team. Whoops.

My colony got this far!

Harry named all of his duplicants after elements. When Chlorine dug into a giant pocket of Chlorine, we all agreed that he had brought this upon himself.

Next week, we're gathering in person for Second Half IRL 2025. I just made that name up. It makes us sound like a big coporation hosting a big public event. We're not. We're five people working out of my garage, but, like, remotely. In any case, I'm excited!

See you all next week!

SSH #35 — Visit Beautiful Florida IX

2025-09-20T16:00:00Z

Happy Saturday!

Last week, Lucien lusciously luxuriated in exciting environmental escapades.

This week, we continue along the same lines. Luckily Lucien loses little light, laudably labouring long over landscapes, leaving my literacy to lecture lyrically.

I think I've got it out of my system now.

Florida IX: Junk Like You've Never Seen Before!— Lucien, Harry

Please disregard all conflicting messages from the rival Nein IX campaign

It gives us great pleasure to announce the opening of the burgeoning rugged frontier world Florida IX to cyber-tourism!

All rumours that Florida IX has played the role of the galaxy's dumping ground for 50 years are completely false. The authentic trash planet experience has been developed by our expert team of landscaping engineers.

Nothing is accidental.

Also! While you are here: why not avail yourself of our activities? Introducing our new quest system: you'll never not know what to do!

ATTENTION TOURISTS: do not deviate from marked tour routes. The Yes! IX campaign will not be held liable for cases of accidental vaporisation or sudden disembodiment.

Most people pay millions for panoramas like this! Some did!

You can't say you weren't given clear instruction

Florida IX truly is a kind of Wonderland

Expanding Environmental Activatables— Lucien

Implementing more types of activations that we can use for great ~~evil~~ good!

Motion sensors, temperature sensors and the good old electric shock

This one needs a power source to open!

Heat Volumes define a space in the level that has a different temperature than the ambient air.

This red volume has an air temperature of 3,000°C ( youch!!)

An unexpected side effect is that when an enemy ventures into the volume, their leg joints heat up and their legs fall off!! We've had the concept of an "adhesive melting point" in the game for ages, going back to when this was a solo project, but I totally forgot about it because the adhesive used for the robot legs melts at 1,200° C, a temperature we don't normally reach in gameplay.

A New Blockout Tool— Lucien, Eryn

It's a game changer! We're building more levels quicker and better than ever before!

Eryn has been building some new tools for level blockouts!

One of them is a tool similar to Blender's "polybuild", which makes it easy to rough out cubes (and eventually other shapes!)

The other one is a new-ish corner/edge snapping mode. You can align objects or set an object's rotation pivot. It's possible to make level geometry VERY quickly with the tools!

Looking Ahead

We've got a dedicated 'enemy sprint' next week, focusing on expanding our array of hostile encounters and figuring out more ways to make combat fun!

Also, we're probably watching Wall-E.

See you next week!

SSH #34 — Active Activatables Actively Activate

2025-09-13T16:00:00Z

Happy Saturday!

Last week, Harry took us down memory lane and showed just how far we've come in the last year and a half.

This week, we've been thinking about environments, both in that we're hiring an environment artist, and that we're thinking about environment interactivity!

Interactivity via Activity— Lucien, Harry

Our last playtest cycle was focused on reforming our combat and electrical systems to make them less attritional. For this cycle, my goal was to make it so more folks on the team can make levels with unique and reactive mechanics.

Specifically, we have a new set of components that can be added to entities to trigger behaviors on themselves or on other entities.

Doesn't that sound exciting and not-at-all technical? Please welcome: Activations!

I think they're turing-complete, unfortunately (?)

Entities can be wired to other entities, enabling our team to build very complex interactions within a level without touching a line of code. It feels fitting to have a system like this in our editor that's as diegetic and tactile as the game!

Harry has already used Activations to create some shockingly evil traps for the player. I'm afraid I may be helping create a monster... or maybe I'm just giving one better tools, it's hard to say.

If you press THIS button, THAT door opens! Wow!

An Nvidia driver update broke a bunch of stuff on my machine, please pardon the debug lighting in some of these screenshots.

Like all of our editor features, this is a feature that players will have access to in the game from day one for building their own contraptions, traps, and entire levels!

Hiring Update— Laura, Lucien

We had our first week of interviews for our 3D Environment Artist role.

While I'm happy that Second Half is a relative safe haven from the chaos, I know that the games industry as a whole is in rough shape. This week was one where I wish we had an unlimited hiring budget and could bring all the fantastic folks we've talked with along for the ride.

To everyone who's taken the time to apply and talk to us about the team: thank you!

Lucien Greathouse (b. 1900s) Google Meet Call, 2025 Oil on canvas A reflection of the author giving interviews all week on Google Meet.

Laura and I have interviews through next week. After that, we're hoping to send an offer immediately and onboard our new team member as soon as possible!

Quests: Coming (Back) Soon— Lucien

MEANWHILE IN SECTOR 80 used to have quests. Here was my favorite quest from the gamescom demo. It was also the first quest we ever made:

This time on 'Are you Smarter than a Toddler?', we pose the question: does it go in the square hole?

Currently, the game doesn't have any quests! We spend every playtest pretending to have meaning in our lives, but without any clearly-defined objects laid out in text on our screen, we're hopelessly lost.

Next week, however, we'll have quests! They'll be driven by Activations! It's going to be a fantastic time, and we'll tell you all about it next week.

Looking Ahead

We finished watching The Martian on Friday. It felt like a pretty great capstone to the week. It also reinforced a lesson we now take to heart: stay away from Matt Damon.

Next week is a playtest week, and I'm looking forward to how much more the game is going to feel like a game. It's a great feeling to see something creative become more and more fully-realized every single week!

See you next week!

SSH #33 — A Trip Down Memory Lane

2025-09-06T16:00:00Z

Happy Saturday!

Bear with us while we recalibrate the Second Half Games magical chronometer. Don't worry, it's definitely Saturday! But which Saturday and in what year might be up for debate.

Last week, Lucien announced an end to the war of attritional gameplay — and also revealed new enemies!

Funny way to end a war, huh?

This week, we're taking a look at how far we've come.

Throwback Saturday— Lucien

Check out this trailer from WAY BACK WHEN:

Lucien cut this trailer together in December, 2023 when the team was just him, with Eryn helping part time. He wanted to release the game by the end of 2024!

"Looking back at how little was actually in the game back then makes me want to cut together a new trailer for us," Lucien said, "Not having a trailer on Steam is no good!"

The Ghost of Gamescom Past— Lucien, Harry

It's now been over a year since we exhibited our demo at Gamescom 2024! In keeping with the theme of looking back at what we've done, Lucien engaged in some reminiscing in our community Discord server.

Our corner of the booth we were sharing with two of Lucien's indie friends!

The demo's gameplay area, taking place entirely in a giant crater we called 'The Cauldron'

Lucien said, 'The cauldron was such a fun environment to work on and I'm always shocked how we put that together in like zero time.' It was our first time working together as a team and we were working with a really tight deadline!

Our first victim!

I think my favourite experience of Gamescom 2024 was seeing how people picked up our engineering system (or didn't). As tutorialisation, Laura drew up this very handy visual aid that was surprisingly easy to miss!

Gamers get very tunnel-visioned when they get new toys. Who knew?

I get pretty cryosleepy on Mondays too.

The Friday Wrap-up— Harry

We are pleased to announce: THE ANTI-ATTRITION CAMPAIGN AND ELECTRICAL REFORM IS A SUCCESS! Please commence applause. Three weeks of backbreaking work (mostly Lucien's) has paid off and we're going to keep moving forward!

This playtest, we also experimented with reintroducing the cable constraints some readers might remember from our old Gamescom 2024 demo. These were only partly implemented at the time because we felt they were confusing and would overly complicate our engineering and our physics. Some smart cookies were specially chosen to test them out anyway.

Well, they're back! And they're still kinda broken and they clip through everything...and also you can lasso things (including enemies) to yourself and drag them around. Laura went through playtest today collecting harmless enemy bodies and walking them around like pets. They dangle off ledges too.

It's the rats all over again.

We'll keep at it. The wires offer an interesting alternative to the magnetic contact-based engineering we've been focusing on, letting you really get off the grid and customise your build. We think it's worth a shot. The builds have become even more chaotic though, so there's some cleaning up to do.

Engineering, off-the-grid! Sort of.

A view of our thermal overlay, showing what parts of the player's circuit and world are hot and cold.

Looking Ahead

Interviews for our 3D Environment Artist role begin next week! That'll keep Lucien and Laura busy all week, while I'm going to continue iterating on our floating warehouse level. We've been collecting a lot of internal feedback during our playtests and have some clear directions to move in!

We also watched half of The Martian as a team a few weeks ago. We still need to finish that. This is actually the second sci-fi film starring Matt Damon that we've watched.

The important lesson is that you should never get on a spaceship with Matt Damon.

SSH #32 — The Anti-Attrition Campaign

2025-08-30T16:00:00Z

Happy Saturday!

If you're in the US or Canada, it's also Labor Day weekend! Everyone in the studio is off on Monday and I'm looking forward to the short week.

Last week, Harry shared pictures of his cat and talked about emails because we didn't have a whole lot to show.

This week, we've got a studio update and updates to the game's core loop!

Ending the War of Attrition— Lucien

A few weeks ago, we realized that we had a few big problems with the game's combat. It's something we've been experimenting with for awhile, but the core issues really crystallized recently:

Taking damage when there's no healing in the game feels bad and made us want to restart the level if we took too much damage.
We couldn't make enemies as deadly as we wanted without making combat frustrating
Players couldn't meaningfully improve their defensive capabilities via engineering

It hit us like a ton of bricks! We've been thinking about our combat through the lens of games like Dark Souls, where you're navigating a world that eats away at your resources, trying to make it to the end without running out. In those games, that includes your health bar, but also your flasks and sometimes weapon durability.

I lost 20% of my health in this fight alone, I'm screwed! 😭

Dark Souls is a game that's largely about attrition, and we realized that our game isn't.

Epiphany in hand, I went into my cave for a day and came out with a proposal: The Anti-Attrition Campaign.

Cut the player's health pool down to almost nothing, but give them an overshield part (e.g. Borderlands or Halo)
Make part damage temporary and let them self-repair after a delay.
Rebalance the electricity economy to be based on a central part that generates electricity instead of just storing it.

My shield absorbs a similar amount of damage as before, then recharges! 😁

Along the same lines, I built some new enemies and realized I could give them shields too!

We're getting kind of tired of the crab robot shape, so expect more variety there soon!

We did our scheduled internal playtest on Friday with the changes and they feel great! I forgot to migrate some of our old parts to the new balancing scheme which messed up some of our progression and there were a few bugs though, so we'll be playing with it again next week.

The Floating Warehouse— Harry

Harry did some fantastic work experimenting with making a multi-level warehouse to serve as the first level for the player right out of the junkyard. I'm shocked at how he was able to use some of our kit pieces to put together a fun space.

The robots run out of the containers and jumpscare you like it's a horror game

The exterior of the level (pictured in previous SSH issues!) was a really fun test for our new volumetrics system. The interior of the level is reminding me of the need to start thinking about lighting. Soon!

One Thousand Applicants— Lucien, Laura

As you may know, we opened a new role last week for a 3D Environment Artist. Since then, we've had over 1,100 applicants! We're blown away at the interest in the role and we're only a bit swamped.

We'll be closing applications and starting interviews in a little over a week. We're very excited, but it's taken a lot of time to get everything prepped for interviews and eventual onboarding. If you haven't heard back from us, fear not — we're aiming to respond to every applicant this time around so we won't leave anyone hanging.

Before we know it, we'll also be looking to find a Sound Designer, a Composer, and a part time Marketer. I'm looking forward to talking with those candidates as well in the coming months. Stay tuned!

The Friday Wrap-up with Harry— Harry

Whereas last week we experienced endless Wednesdays, we're in a weird Friday-is-always-playtest-Friday loop now.

We were meant to have a playtest last week, which we pushed to today, and now we're planning for another playtest next week too! It's playtests all the weeks down.

Lucien is still tinkering with the electrical system. He told me this morning that he'd updated how the batteries worked, and that it was my job to go into our playtesting levels and replace all the loot with new batteries and capacitors. Turns out - he didn't actually change the electrical system at all! So I was replacing those batteries with themselves! He's going to have me counting gravel next week, just watch. I earn my pay.

A side effect of Lucien's extraordinary electrical error is that we got to enjoy unlimited power! This, combined with more generous enemy loot, meant we put together some pretty vicious builds.

Our team is a bunch of packrats!

Rasmus seemed to have the engineering philosophy of just stacking everything on top of himself and tripling up on the arcing 'glob launcher' weapons. I figured I'd go with a laser beam focused build, loading up as many lasers onto my front as I could.

Lucien observed that our builds look far more... animalistic than usual. Give us a week and we'll be the new Horizon game.

This build made the game's part management UI totally fall apart, whoops

Beef panaeng curry for dinner tonight.

Be good!

Looking Ahead

It feels good to have something to show! I've been working on stuff that's very non-visual in the guts of the game and that can be disheartening. I think we're headed in a very good direction and I'm excited to iron out a bunch of bugs next week and feel that next Friday.

We have an in-person team meetup scheduled in around a month. Between that and the hiring, there's a lot of administrative work right now in the studio. I don't mind it since it comes with running a small team, but I really want to work on making weird robots instead.

See you all next week!

SSH #31 — Not Wednesday

2025-08-23T16:00:00Z

It's Saturday! So ends the unfortunate week of Wednesdays.

Due to a calendar error, every day at Second Half this week has been Wednesday.

It's never a week of Saturdays, is it? It's always Wednesday. Or Tuesday — which is really just a pre-Wednesday.

But it's Saturday NOW! And you know what that means: your weekly news on MEANWHILE IN SECTOR 80!

Last week, I wrote a LOT of things and didn't have many pictures.

This week, I got a phonecall from our publisher and the eldritch noises that spewed forth from my Nokia mean I will never be the same again.

I've learned my lesson! More images, fewer words!

Second Half Games: Now Hiring!— Lucien & Laura

Many new readers will have seen we've put up a new job post for a 3D Environment Artist!

Well done Laura!

I know there's so many of you because when I wake up, my unread emails number in the hundreds.

Lucien and Laura have been working so hard to keep on top of all the responses as they come flowing in.

We have lots of new friends!

We've been so impressed with the responses we've received and everyone's really excited to go through all the applications in this coming week or so.

Bitten by the Writing Bug— Harry

While Lucien and Laura were being so productive and professional putting together their hiring post, I consolidated a bunch of the writing themes and ideas we've established in previous months.

Say it with me now: Look at this graph.

The Misery-Hope Index is a Second Half scientific approach to writing science-fiction. Patent pending.

There's a LOT of other stuff too, but they're too important to show you just yet. Trust me, it'd ruin the magic.

Friday Wrap-up— Harry

Hello, fresh faces of the Second Half Games Discord Newsletter!

It's Friday, so I get to do my little weekly round-up post! The biggest highlight of the week, as I'm sure many of you know, is that we are now hiring for a 3D environment artist! We are frankly completely bowled over by the interest in this role - the post has been up somewhere in the region of 24 hours now and we have as many as 500 applicant emails!

It's actually a little scary. I haven't had that many unread emails in my inbox since I was in high school, and let's be honest - none of those ones were anywhere near as important or meaningful.

We were scheduled to do our regular fortnightly playtesting today, but this week has heralded some unprecedented changes to our gameplay mechanics. We could have tested things today, but it would have been very half-baked. Since the new changes have the potential to be transformative, we thought we'd give ourselves another week. Have a sneak-peek at a new part that Lucien's made for the player.

What could it be? Find out next week in MEANWHILE IN SECTOR 80!

Lucien says I write too much and don't include enough images in these posts. Here's a photo of my cat, Jasmine. For the algorithm. For morale.

She is all stomach, no brains, and I love her very much.

Pork steaks for dinner.

Be good!

Looking Ahead

Okay, next week is playtest FOR REAL this time. Lots of level stuff, implementing the mechanical changes, and processing applications!

SSH #30 — Let Me Paint You A Picture

2025-08-16T16:00:00Z

Hwæt! Saturday comes, and with it, the good news of MEANWHILE IN SECTOR 80!

It's time for Saturday @ Second Half #30! THIRTY! THE BIG THREE-ZERO! What a milestone.

All the best things start happening at 30.

That reminds me that I need to book a doctor's appointment. While I'm doing that, you keep yourself busy with this newsletter. Okay? Okay.

Last week we trapped ourselves (and you!) in a world of junk.

We're still in the world of junk, but it's a little nicer now — even if it is darker and scarier too.

Also, Lucien is on the warpath.

A New Painting!— Laura

It's like you! Reading this! Just with less danger.

Laura's been busy! We've got a brilliant new illustration from her.

My favourite thing is the enemy robot in the bottom right. Lucien and I didn't even notice it at first.

The End of Attrition— Lucien

Something that keeps coming up in our playtests is attritional gameplay. This is partly a result of overly eager combat encounter design ('yeah you know what, I WILL put seven enemy robots in this room') but also more broadly connected to our gameplay loop.

A big part of that comes down to how we handle persistence — particularly the decisions we make about enemies, loot and the player all respawning. We've always feared a 'Minecraft death run' feeling of having the player die and lose all their items unless they can return to their corpse in time to pick it all back up again.

There are other problems too. MEANWHILE IN SECTOR 80 is a game with a lot of moving parts, including a complex electrical simulation system that powers all of the player's (and enemies') weapons. Loot and progression currently revolve around getting bigger and better batteries and capacitors.

But all those parts you loot and equip can also be broken by enemy gunfire, forcing you to keep maintaining your gear as you go through a level.

Right now, when the player dies, they respawn at the start of the level with all their gear back at full health. All the enemies respawn too. So, when you go into a level and one of your weapons gets shot off 10 minutes into a 20 minute level...you might really be best off just respawning and starting again.

This can all get rather tiring.

BUT WORRY NO MORE, CITIZEN!

Lucien's got the solution for us. He's stopped yelling about Rocket League every time we go past him in the office, but it's been replaced with something perhaps even more dangerous. After a cacophony of hammering and drilling sounds, he emerged from his office, covered in sawdust, to announce the beginning of the 'anti-attrition campaign'.

This means that within a week, we will have an overhauled power economy, new ways of dealing with damaged/broken parts and a new kind of player shielding. We're all very excited.

I'm going to have to repair a bloody big hole in my office wall now though.

Friday Wrap-up— Harry

Hello, soot-stained orphans of the Second Half Games Newsletter!

Happy Friday! I've been away in London all week (hence the soot, and the orphans). This has bankrupted me, though I did get to see the original patent of the rotisserie chicken oven invented by a Belgian man called 'Merlin' in 1773. He also invented the roller-skate. Everybody say 'thank you Merlin'.

While I've been gone, everyone else has been ploughing away at furthering the development of MEANWHILE IN SECTOR 80. We've got a lot of nice new things coming up, but they aren't quite baked yet - but you'll see them next week or the week after!

We played Mars First Logistics again tonight! The rest of the team had already played it in October last year, but I've never had the chance to give it a go. I would not make a very good engineer. Good thing I'm just a writer.

Did you know there are horns in that game that play different notes depending on what colour they are? Lucien made a piano. Laura played 'Happy Birthday' among other things. A good time was had by everyone involved.

It's playtesting again next week, and Lucien's got a lot of gameplay tweaks and some partly reimagined mechanics to show us. I'll be on levels again - I can't hide from them forever.

Thai red curry for dinner.

Be good!

Looking Ahead

Next week is another playtest week! My plan is to crack on with the floating platform level, hopefully taking inspiration from all my favourite warehouse shooting levels. There may or may not be a puzzle involving a crane.

Lucien's still working on implementing his anti-attrition campaign, but we're all very excited to see how that will improve our gameplay.

SSH #29 — Trash Planet, Population: You

2025-08-08T16:00:00Z

It's SATURDAY!

I'm writing this on Friday because on Saturday I will be on a TRAIN. And people who use laptops on trains are scary and I'm not important enough to do that.

I'm not being petty! I'm being prompt and responsible with my writing commitments! Don't make me call my lawyer!

Ready or not, it's time for your weekly news on MEANWHILE IN SECTOR 80!

Last week we were beset, as we so often are, by aphorisms and horses.

We continue to be beset by both, but maybe slightly less so. We'll just have to hope Lucien feels like being kind to us.

This week, we're still innovating, moving and possibly even grooving in the world of junk!

Cutting Edge Junk Piles— Laura, Eryn

Eagle eyed readers might remember a post from earlier in June where we showcased early experiments in trash mountain generation.

Laura and Eryn are continually hacking away at the coalface of junk pile generation, with added focus on collisions and how it looks with our new atmosphere and lighting tools.

It's got sliders and everything. I'm scared to touch anything in case I fill my own world with junk. I've heard reports that our junk generation could be even more complex next week. Who knows what the world will look like in a month?

Not me. I'll be buried in a pile of generated junk.

Trash piles are the intersection between art and science.

Sector 80 Wipeout Castle— Rasmus

We are going through the motions. Things are moving! Round and around we go. Erm... I'm working on motorized hinges for environmental puzzles and hazards.

Rasmus says they don't have Takeshi's Castle in Sweden. They do now.

Friday Wrap-up— Harry

Hello, audacious contenders of the Second Half Games Newsletter!

Playtest Friday! Not much in the way of new levels this week, as I'm on writing duty again. It means my brain hurts, but in a good way. What's a good rhyme for 'tarsier?' Actually, does anyone even know what a tarsier is?

We've also found out that emojis in Slack are localised. The rest of the team is making fun of me for the emoji :bin_your_rubbish: (🚮) instead of :put_litter_in_its_place: (🚮). We are all puzzled by :articulated_lorry: (🚛) though. The Lorry Is Eternal and International.

You've already seen Rasmus's new play palace. Keep your eyes peeled for even more zany antics in our maps going forward. Lucien's done a lot of tweaking with the camera and the character controller, so a more interesting mix of movement and combat in progression is possible.

Work continues on the junkyard! Here's one of Lucien's playtest screenshots today, showing an area right at the start of the game. Still a bit to tweak, but we're getting somewhere!

Start as trash, become invicible, etc.

Chicken strips and chips (or fries) for dinner.

Be good!

Looking Ahead

Lucien's Rocket League arc isn't over yet. He's upset that nobody has challenged to a duel though. As a reminder:

'If you can beat me in a duel, you can win an early demo of the game. Just join our Discord server and send the message "@lpg It's time to duel!" '

I came to work today and before my daily meeting with him, I heard him yell this to someone on the phone:

'I get it, the prospect of dueling a PLATINUM 3 DUELIST is too much for people to deal with. They understood that they had absolutely no shot, and that I am guarding the game like a dragon with its treasure hoard!'

He keeps talking about diamonds and insisting we call him 'champ' while he froths at the mouth. Help.

I'm away to London all of next week, but the plan for the rest of the team is just to keep hammering away at the sticky bits we encountered in playtesting! Maybe some interesting schedule shakeups too, we'll see!

SSH #28 — Gift Horse

2025-08-02T16:00:00Z

There's a saying: don't look a gift horse in the mouth.

Unrelatedly, I have a present for you. It's this post. Open it! It's got news about our game in it.

I made this poster. I bet you can't tell. I bet you think I contracted a very expensive design and marketing agency to come up with this. Well, I didn't.

Last week, we shared some of our freshly squeezed wormhole and shield juice with you. That stuff's expensive, you know. Drink up!

This week, we made a brand new character rig and spent some time learning IlluGen, a cool new VFX tool.

Spin Your Hips with RIG V2

Our game's player character has gone through a number of iterations.

It used to be a lizard blob man! Then we got artists on the team, and it became a high fidelity person in a space suit, codenamed Eurydice. After gamescom, we made some gameplay changes and turned the character into a chunky maintenance robot.

In real life, humans had a common ancestor with apes. In MS80, humans evolved directly from bipedal lizards. That's 100% real lore. You can ask Harry about it when he's back.

The new character isn't production quality, but it's roughly the right shape and size and has been an awesome platform for experimentation.

You can see Eurydice in all our capsule and key art still. That's on the docket to update sooner than later!

Shout out to Laura and the Second Half alumni, Ed and Melissa, for their awesome work on this character!

With the robot character, we originally kept the same Mixamo rig and animations as the previous characters. It worked pretty well, but the rig didn't fit the new character's proportions and it didn't feel very much like a robot.

We also kept having limbs overlap due to the aiming IK system interacting with human-ish arm movements that led to us dying a lot

That's GOTTA hurt!

That changed this week! I created a new rig and some animations to go with it. The character now pivots at the hips and moves its entire upper body when aiming. It's a little uncanny, but it's definitely more robot.

I'm finally putting the art degree that I lie about having to use!

It's on our roadmap to hire an animator for a few months once we're closer to Early Access. For now, the work I've done will tide us over.

IlluGen Release

JangaFX, the creators of EmberGen and friends, released their new VFX tool, IlluGen. We'd been experimenting with EmberGen for some time but ultimately realized that it's for fire. Who'da thought?

We heard about IlluGen and I was so excited I even put it the team's calendar.

It was an all-day affair

It turns out that IlluGen is really neat! The team behind it has also been very responsive in handling bug reports and feature requests.

Expect some fancy new effects around next week from Laura, who's been having a great time tinkering.

Looking Ahead

We watched Arrival together on Friday. It's a good movie. It joins Interstellar in the ever-growing list of "daughter-based sci-fi" movies we've seen as a team.

I'm not sure what we'll be working on next week. I think it's my job to know that. Personally, my brain has been totally taken over by a Rocket League relapse. If you can beat me in a duel, you can win an early demo of the game. Just join our Discord server and send the message "@lpg It's time to duel!"

Until next week! Cheers.

SSH #27 — Yeet Into Wormhole

2025-07-26T16:00:00Z

What's the best day of the week?

SATURDAY!

What happens today?

News about MEANWHILE IN SECTOR 80!

Last week, Harry unveiled the secret inner workings of Second Half Games and unfortunately publicly implicated us in our plot to rule the world.

This week, we juiced the heck out of anything we could get our hands on. Specifically: wormholes and energy shields.

Persistent Worlds

In MEANWHILE IN SECTOR 80, you travel via wormhole between planets in a stolen spaceship that has limited range. Before this week, we had no animation for traveling between planets.

That made travel feel kind of bland, but it is bland NO LONGER!

Please make sound effects while watching this video, as there aren't any in the game yet.

The sudden addition of a wild spectacle happening outside the ship has made us think more about how the ship should be laid out to make visiting exotic alien planets interesting. You'd think they'd sell themselves, but travel agents have to make a living somehow.

I also created a new savefile format to support storing all of the places you can visit. That's not a tangible thing that you can see, so instead, take a look at the new "load game" screen!

In the industry, we call this 'programmer UI'

Being able to leave and come back to the same place and see it exactly as you left it is surprisingly pleasant.

It's one of those things that makes the game feel way more like a real video game instead of just an art project that five people are creating in a shed in my backyard.

Shields Come to Life— Eryn & Laura

Last week, Laura created some concepts for our frontal energy shield part, which temporarily provides immunity from energy weapons in one direction.

A refresher to reactivate any latent neurons

This week, Eryn made those shields real, replete with deployment and retraction animations!

Block, block, block, the shots, gently in the town!

It's been a great success, and the new visuals have made us use the shield way more than before. We apes love when things look good.

We'll have a full body, always-on shield coming sooner than later, something that I'm very excited about!

The Friday Wrap-up With Harry— Harry

Hello, complex multicellular orga- oh crap, I used that one about 4 weeks ago.

Hello, adjective nouns of the- no, I used that one back in March.

You know, I should have been more careful before I committed to this bit back in January. I've been writing these more or less every week since January! That's more than half a year ago! It'll be Christmas soon.

I'm very tired.

Hello, friends of the Second Half Games Newsletter!

It is Friday again. It's been a quiet week for me at Second Half, but a busy one for the rest of the team. If you've been keeping up with our dev updates, you'll know we've pushed through some new updates for shields and level persistence.

We're all about persistence here at Second Half.

A real photo of Second Half Games Headquarters as of July 26th. The man pictured is our seventh studio lawyer, Dr. Letsorder Arbys II.

Lucien's also made some new changes to our ship and to the ship's lightspeed animations. I'm aiming to get on some new sound effects for that next week, but hopefully you'll get to have a look at that pretty soon.

We had a playtest today! No new levels, but a lot of playing around and ironing out some creases.

Eryn made this thing. It's horrific, and it's brilliant. I'm going to call it 'the laserbeast', like a wildebeest, but laser, except it isn't like a wildebeest at all. It's much more like a giraffe, so I've almost got the geography right.

It's like a giraffe, but it shoots lasers instead of eating leaves.

She has her own nickname for it, but I don't think I can repeat that here in polite company. There could be children reading. I hope there aren't.

It's six hubs connected to a gimbal connected to a laser blaster, giving you the ability to peak round corners and pierce enemy shields by charging through them.

What could enemies possibly do about this!?

I think I'm going to have to redesign some of the combat encounters. Eryn continues to be an unaccounted factor in the world of death robots, which we love her for.

Dongbei zhajiangmian for dinner.

Be good!

Looking Ahead

It's usually a fun week when it's a playtest week. My backlog is filled with little bugs to fix across the whole game as we march slowly towards our next public alpha test. After gamescom last year, I promised to have a new demo out by gamescom 2025, and I'd love to keep that promise!

Next week, I'm creating a new rig and animations for the player character to maximize their robotic nature and eliminate Mixamo once and for all.

Harry is close to having a draft of the game's story, Laura is working on concepts for in-game dialogue, Rasmus will be creating evil traps to fill levels with, and Eryn has an assignment so secret that she's not even been informed of it yet.

We'll see you next week!

SSH #26 — Setting Boundaries

2025-07-19T16:00:00Z

Hello! It's Saturday! That means it's time for your regularly scheduled news about MEANWHILE IN SECTOR 80.

Actually, it isn't Saturday anymore in this timezone. I lied. Stop reading at once.

Last week, there was Mac support, a new floating level, and BISON.

This week, there's some creative work in the realms of scanning, shielding, and writing.

Scanner Updates— Rasmus

The scanner has been a forgotten child for a bit but I gave it some attention. It is now useful for finding salvageable parts among the rubble of destroyed enemies. Trash is not being lit up and the color makes it easy to see what parts can be used right away and which parts can be used after repairing them.

Separating trash from treasure!

New Shield Concepts— Laura, Harry

Speaking of forgotten children, it's time our shields got a bit of a polish!

Hexa-shields, in all their glory!

Shields have existed in some form or another for months now, but they've been in a very rough-and-ready state purely to test out their effect on gameplay. We're certain we want shields as a lootable part in MEANWHILE IN SECTOR 80, but are playing around with their shapes and sizes.

The goal is to have two kinds of shields — one that faces mostly one direction, while another covers the entire surface of a target, wrapping around their body in a tighter protective forcefield frame.

You'll notice there are hexagons. Hexagons are cool! They're a sci-fi shape!

It also turns out there's no way to mathematically construct a 'sphere' out of hexagons. You need to sneak a few pentagons in there too. You learn something new every week at Second Half!

Friday Wrap-up— Harry

Hello, featherless bipeds of the Second Half Games Newsletter!

Friday! Again! You're never that far away from a Friday, even if it feels like it never arrives soon enough.

That's how it works. That's the law. I don't make the rules.

It's been a pretty balanced week at Second Half for me. We had a big writing meeting. We have a graph now! Or maybe it's a chart? I'm not really sure what the distinction is. I thought about posting a screenshot of it here for your viewing pleasure, but decided against it.

Watch this clip of Dr Strangelove instead. Unrelated.

Team Sync at Second Half Games

But we also have a story! Terry Pratchett described his writing process as a 'valley full of clouds', where you come down from a mountain and maybe can just about see the next mountain in the distance, but otherwise have to feel your way from tree to tree.

We have a valley now, and we can confirm it's full of clouds. It's a little less cloudy than it was.

We watched Pacific Rim for our team Play and Watch session today! That film is wild! Maybe the big problem we're facing in the development of MEANWHILE IN SECTOR 80 is that our robot protagonist isn't 250 feet tall.

I asked the team afterwards if that was the problem. Turns out that's not the problem. We aren't changing the game's scale after all. Sorry mecha anime heads. I tried. Sometimes you have to fight and lose.

Chainswords and nuclear reactors though. Now that's two things I think everyone's life could do with a little more of.

Egg and tomato stir fried noodles for dinner.

Be good!

Looking Ahead

It's time for another internal playtest next week! The top goal, as ever, is a more fleshed-out version of our floating level's initial warehouse combat encounter, followed by some prototyping of the level's 'phase 2.' Work also continues on concepting the follow-up level to this, as well as combat tweaks here and there.

SSH #25 — Sky High

2025-07-12T16:00:00Z

Happy Saturday! It's time for your regularly scheduled news about MEANWHILE IN SECTOR 80. Please commence applause and/or gift-giving.

Deposit all worldly possessions in the basket on the left as you exit, thank you.

Last week, our prestigious, professional, and punctual blog was rudely hijacked by gorgeous holiday photography. There will be consequences.

This week, we're back to being sensible, and we've brought with us a new level concept and some Mac support!

Mac Support (Sort of)— Lucien

Whenever I travel, I use a MacBook! I like the battery life, but software compatibility (especially games) is usually really bad.

But — good news for MS80, the game now runs natively fairly well on macOS! Behold:

Simply Mactastic

No promises on an official Mac release (the gap between “running” and “shippable” is pretty big) but I’d be game for an experimental branch!

FTL: Full Team Liftoff— Harry

Since last Friday was a day off, we shifted the usual team Play and Watch session to Monday night! We played FTL: Faster Than Light.

It's one of my favourite games and a shining beacon of an indie. From what I've heard, the masterminds behind it nailed down their gameplay loop and core concepts almost immediately and spent months iterating on it.

FTL: Faster Than Light is an important touchstone for MEANWHILE IN SECTOR 80, partly as a sci-fi game set in space, but also because it revolves around careful management of an energy economy with modular weapons.

FTL is a HARD game, and you need to stay on your toes redistributing your ship's power between weapons, shields, engines, and more to even hope to win. The game communicates all this through handy little visuals showing power distribution between systems, and letting you know when something is damaged, manned, or ready to fire!

A nifty little hotbar

Also, Laura stayed up to 3am playing it. I once played it for 10 hours straight and didn't beat the final Rebel Flagship boss a single time.

Sky High Friday Wrap-up— Laura, Harry

Hello, regularly-proportioned humanoids of the Second Half Games Newsletter!

Friday! We took last Friday off as a studio holiday. I went to Scotland. It was cold. There were bagpipes.

Lucien is still away herding bison on his family hydroelectric dam in Montana. We all miss him very much. We especially miss all the times he wasn't on a Mac device. It's the little things, really.

We had a playtest this week! Not a big one, and no huge changes from two weeks ago - except, oh wait! We've got a new level concept!

Some of Laura's concepts

Situated some 25,000 feet (about 11,000 legs if you're someone who uses sensible units) in the sky, our new level soars over the clouds. We are yet to effectively depict an above-cloud atmosphere, but that's by-the-by. What are you? A cloud cop?

Jokes aside, Laura has worked incredibly hard on imagining what a flying platform location that's partly fragmented and drifted/fallen away could look like in Sector 80. We're planning on this being the first map in a two or possibly three map series, focused on investigating the fate of this platform and salvaging what data/toys it might have.

The current prototype in-game

17 pork and chive dumplings for dinner. I counted.

Be good!

Looking Ahead

Top of the docket is to continue hammering away at the floating complex concept. Laura and I are still figuring out a workflow for swapping tasks between Blender and our editor, but it's given us some improved versatility. We're all happy to be working with a strong level concept in such an interesting space.

Besides that, we need to answer a few questions about our approach to loot and rewarding the player, as well as figuring out a new kind of puzzle we'd like to implement.

SSH #24 — Intermission IV

2025-07-07T16:00:00Z

Hello! It's not Saturday anymore, except here at Second Half Games. Writing these blog posts resets the calendar back to Saturday here. It's how we make time for everything.

Eryn and I have been visiting my family back in my home state of Montana. As such, neither of us have been working on the game for the last week.

View from the SKQ Dam Trail towards the Mission Mountains

I have not kept in touch with the rest of the team. They're probably working on our awesome upcoming game, MEANWHILE IN SECTOR 80. I hope they're doing okay.

Last week, we had a wonderful playtest on a playground.

This week, the team is probably up to some stuff, but because I've hijacked the blog, you get to hear about our trip instead.

Montana as Home

I grew up in Missoula, Montana. The western part of the state is full of snowcapped mountains, winding rivers, and beautiful lakes.

View from the top of the CSKT Bison Range

I've lived in Ohio for the last few years. There are no mountains there — only cornfields — and the rivers are muddy and full of snakes. I prefer the mountains.

A couple times a year, I go back home to visit my family in western Montana. This time we brought some of Eryn's family with us, which spurred us to do more sightseeing than normal.

Flathead Lake

Most of my family lives near Flathead Lake, but it's a very big lake! It takes more than an hour to drive the north-south highways on either side, US 93 or MT 35.

We watched fireworks on the 3rd of July on the lake. We picked a bad spot and had to walk pretty far from here to actually see the fireworks!

We spent time swimming, kayaking, and even went on a music cruise on the lake!

The band was playing "Folsom Prison Blues" when this picture was taken. Please hum it while reading the remainder of this post. Thank you.

Glacier National Park

Despite growing up in Montana and spending most of my life there, I had never visited Glacier National Park. Fixing that was easy: it turns out you can just go places.

Hands-down the most beautiful place I've ever been in my life.

This year, the western entrance to the park has congestion limits starting early in the morning on most days. We opted to drive around the park and enter via the eastern entrance. The drive there was worth it alone!

Going-to-the-Sun Road is steep and winding but very well-maintained.

We drove the length of Going-to-the-Sun Road, stretching from Two Medicine Lake to Lake McDonald. Both lakes were clear, freezing cold, and gorgeous.

The snowpack is light this year across the state. Still, it was interesting to hike in snow in 80°F weather!

Looking ahead on the road we're about to drive down.

On our last stop on our way out of the park, we waded into Lake McDonald and cooled off. After some pretty big crowds around Logan Pass, I was surprised that there was nobody at the lake.

Look at how clear that water is!

After the long day, everyone in the car was exhausted and fell asleep before we even made it out of the park.

We also visited some other minor landmarks in the area.

Two Dams and a Buffalo

A lot of the power in the Flathead lake area is generated via the Seli’š Ksanka Qlispe’ Dam, a hydroelectric dam owned by the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes. There's a nice short hike down to an overlook with wonderful views.

All of the gates closed to preserve the water level of Flathead Lake.

The gates to the dam were closed on our visit on account of extremely low snowpack levels in the mountains this year.

We also visited Hungry Horse Dam on this trip. It's one of the largest dams in the US and was the second tallest concrete dam in the world when it was built.

The height difference between the resevoir and the valley below is startling!

Another spot we visited was the CSKT Bison Range.

Millions of bison used to roam North America. These days, the population is in the tens of thousands after facing near-extinction in the 19th century. A few hundred of those bison live in this range.

I admit I'm not much of a wildlife photographer

Looking Ahead

Eryn and I will be out for one more week. The sightseeing phase of the trip is over and now we get to relax. If you join us on Discord, I'll be around all week incorrectly answering questions about bison.

Next week, you'll hear from Harry and the rest of the team about how the game is going! I'm interested to know how it's going as well.

See y'all later!

SSH #23 — Sector 80 Play Place

2025-06-28T16:00:00Z

Hello and welcome to Saturday! If Saturday is already over in your locale, please pretend it is still Saturday.

Today, shockingly, we're going to learn about what's happening with MEANWHILE IN SECTOR 80!

Last week, we launched our newly renovated Steam page.

This week, we experimented with new controls and played on a playground!

A Positive Atmosphere— Lucien

I did some work this week to improve our atmosphere implementation. It's still rough, but having unified volumetric rendering for the atmosphere and fog is shaping up to be pretty cool.

SMELL THAT AIR! CAN'T YOU JUST DRINK IT LIKE BOOOOZE?

Lights, Camera, Action Groups!— Lucien

For this playtest cycle, we've been cooking up a new way to configure the player's equipment!

Player builds can get very complex, with several weapons, gimbals, and power sources. Check out my build from Friday's playtest:

So many weapons, so little time!

To manage all these parts, we created the concept of an "action group", and added a section to the item tooltips to configure which action group and hotkey an object should be bound to.

Rebind and regroup on a whim!

You can also configure the player robot itself. You can set which arms are active for an action group as well as which camera the game should use when you activate that action group.

ERSTWHILE IN SPREADSHEET 80

This feature has landed somewhere between the action groups in Kerbal Space Program and the channels in Mars First Logistics so far. After playtesting, I think our implementation is a little too clunky, so we'll keep iterating!

The Friday Wrap-up— Harry

Hello, complex multicellular organisms of the Second Half Games Newsletter!

It was a playtest Friday! This week's featured some new atmospheric effects and a totally reworked level.

It's got a playground and everything. There's a climbing frame and pipes. It's like a birthday in there, albeit with laser-spewing, electro-shock crab robots.

I played in this exact playtest at McDonald's in the year 2001

It's not really like a birthday at all, actually.

Today's big level rework was really the result of a series of experiments. The goal of all of these was mainly just to try making something a little different.

With a modular kit of floors, walls and ceilings, it's way too tempting to fill every single level with long, twisting hallways of close-quarters/no-cover shooting matches. That's a valuable part of our gameplay loop, but an entire level of that gets old very quickly.

Our biggest game inspiration is actually Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy

SO, today's level: playground, forest, a 'Monty Hall problem,' and whatever the hell the other kind of forest is.

It's not pretty, but it's certainly interesting, and I've learned a lot today about what works and what doesn't. More changes in the weeks to come!

A shot into the level from the outside. It used to be a big stadium!

Laab moo for dinner.

Be good!

Looking Ahead

Running playtests every other Friday has continued to be very enlightening and we had an awesome time this week. It's always fulfilling to have validation about the things we're doing well, and a clear path to fix all of the things that aren't good yet.

Next week, the team is going to be playing FTL: Faster Than Light. I'll be out for a couple weeks and spending some time back home, but I'm leaving the team in capable hands!

See y'all next week!

SSH #22 — Full Steam Ahead!

2025-06-21T16:00:00Z

Happy Saturday! Wait, it's SATURDAY? Already?

Listen, if you're reading this — there isn't much time! Before it's too late, you need to—

OH NO — IT'S HERE!

It's time for your regularly scheduled news about MEANWHILE IN SECTOR 80!

Please disregard all previous messages.

Last week, we were out and about.

This week, we have a new Steam page and we're turning trash into tech and tech into trash!

A New Steam Page!— Lucien, Laura, Harry

Check out our shiny new Steam page!

Oooooh... Aaahhhhh

We've updated all of the screenshots to show more recent playtest footage as well as reworked a lot of the description text — though much of it will be changed at least a few more times before release! It really seems that three cool GIFs highlighting the tenets of your game has become the Steam meta!

There's still a few bits here and there that need updating, but at least it's no longer almost 10 months out of date. It'll be a continual process of rolling out updates on it as the year goes on, but it's in a much better spot than it was.

You picked a bad time to get lost, friend!

I had a lot of fun making some builds for one of the GIFs on there. Some of them are even playable, though one (mounting NINE simultaneous laser beams) does have a tendency to generate so much heat it destroys itself.

I also named most of them after films or film characters. I am a big fan of Eduard Sousahands.

High Fidelity Junk— Laura, Eryn

Even though MEANWHILE IN SECTOR 80 is a game about robots, all of us at Second Half are definitely, categorically all humans, 100% for sure.

SO we're very good at doing what humans do — which is mostly just creating large piles of trash and not wanting to take any responsibility for it. We're now automating ourselves out of this too, so we can create mountains of trash more efficiently and with even less human responsibility than ever before.

Coming soon to a resi-hab-district near you: procedurally generated trash mountains. Specially selected readers may already be acutely familiar with these. Take those DoorDash bags out before it's too late.

At least it'll keep rents low?

Looking Ahead

We played the recent Jump Ship demo during our Friday night Play and Watch session this week! We had a lot of fun, and learned even more! We mostly just wasted ammo and got lost in our own ship, but it was all for the good cause of team-building!

Next week, it's time for another internal playtest. Hopefully it will bring a few reworked levels, maybe a couple of new ones, and a lot more (good) junk.

SSH #21 — No Kings

2025-06-18T16:00:00Z

Happy belated Saturday! You might've noticed that there was no Saturday @ Second Half on June 14th.

I was out participating in the weekend's protests here in the US. The No Kings protest was one of the largest protests in US history, spread throughout the country.

We'll be be back with more news about our game next Saturday, on June 21st.

SSH #20 — First Saturday of Pride

2025-06-07T16:00:00Z

Happy Saturday! It's time for some learnin' about MEANWHILE IN SECTOR 80!

Last week, we showed our playable intro level, The Junkyard, alongside some other spick and span new bits of art.

This week, we've got a new prototype weapon, some new VFX tools, and some physics experiments — but first, an aside.

Happy Pride Month!

It's June, and that means it's Pride Month. In today's world, with so many big companies withdrawing from pride events and kowtowing to fascists, it's important for me to say that we stand with our LGBTQ+ friends and loved ones.

Half and half and half

We're a very small, not-quite-established studio, but we can't espouse empathy and humanity while leaving our most vulnerable behind.

Energy Launcher Prototype

I've been prototyping a bunch of new weapons this week! One of them is a energy grenade launcher, like Zarya's alt fire from Overwatch.

The weapon itself is a very rough prototype! It tends to blow itself up and the projectile is an emissive sphere, but it sometimes works!

Pardon the mess — this is Lucien's Duplo Playground, a testing scene

This was a great opportunity for Laura and I to start learning how to use EmberGen. That little explosion is the first flipbook in the game and it's turned out surprisingly well!

Container Cranes Enter Sector 80— Rasmus

The elevators we have are using the physics engine to move around with motorized joints. This makes them composable in interesting ways. I have been pushing the limits of them by making a crane that can move containers around. This is all done using a series of "elevators" attached to each other.

There are elevators everywhere for those with the eyes to see.

Friday @ Second Half

Every Friday, we get together as a team and play a game or watch a movie. It's a great opportunity to spend some casual time together and it's nice to build common touchstones. Recently, we watched Mickey 17 and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and recently played Dark Souls and the Mycopunk demo.

This Friday, we played The Division 2. It's got interesting enemy design and none of the folks on our team had much experience with third person cover shooters or looter-shooters.

Next week, we're planning on playing the Jump Ship demo. It looks extremely cool from what I've seen.

Looking Ahead

Next week is a playtest week! I'm excited to see how the game feels with some of our new effects and I'm still rushing to prototype as many weapons as I can.

Dune: Awakening entered advanced access this week and has taken over my life. Stay tuned to see if I ever come back to work or if I'm going to be work on my new spice mining startup full-time. We've already raised 500k Solaris during our Series A round and are always open for additional investors.

SSH #19 — Playing in The Junkyard

2025-05-31T16:00:00Z

Happy Saturday! It's time for some brand new information about everybody's favorite upcoming sci-fi action-engineering metroidvania, MEANWHILE IN SECTOR 80!

Last week, we showed some level concepts and talked about our future plans.

This week, we're sharing some details about an early prototype level, The Junkyard, which we got up and running in time for our most recent playtest.

The Junkyard

Laura put together a playable prototype of the junkyard level concept we've been working on to serve as the intro to the game.

We start the player out with no equipment and have them rebuild themselves from scrap, do a little parkour, puzzling, and combat, before we let them loose on the rest of the game.

Introducing a wonderful new housing community, Dowijuya! Enjoy rolling hills, stark blue skies, and quiet neighbors. Now accepting investors.

The junkyard will eventually be full of stuff that's similar in shape to the player and the robots in the game.

For now, we've just got the most important bits: a couple dead player-like bots with a battery and a weapon for you to scavenge.

So far, you're doing better than THAT guy!

The level has a gentle introduction to puzzles and how we use glowing key objects, elevators, and drag-and-drop engineering.

This room used to be a food market for employees of McOven Manufacturing, creators of the famous Mega McOven. Founded by John McOven.

It's also got a gentle on-ramp to combat with some of the enemies we've got so far in development.

That's GOTTA hurt!

In the end, you come across a vehicle that will take you out of here and send you on the rest of your adventure!

They even left the keys in the ignition!

It was fun to see a level progress from concept to roughly playable, and Laura did a great job working within the game's current constraints.

Once you get out of The Junkyard, you end up on the newly renovated Home Ship.

We didn't buy one this one in Kellogg, Idaho; we built it ourselves.

Looking Ahead

This week was one of those where it feels like there's an endless number of things to do. It's overwhelming and tough, but doable!

I'm glad to be working with a wonderful team and I'm happy that we've got the time and space to work on such an interesting and unusual game.

I'll see you all next week, spirits willing!

SSH #18 — Wake Up and Smell Trash

2025-05-24T16:00:00Z

Happy Saturday! Time for your weekly news on MEANWHILE IN SECTOR 80!

Last time, we celebrated our triumph of porting to Jolt Physics.

This week, we've got some exciting new art, AI, and enemies in the pipeline!

The Junkyard— Laura

We've been thinking about the very start of the game lately! Here are some rough paintings of what we're calling the junkyard tutorial.

Imagine waking up here — couldn't be me

The focus was to explore the mood of the level and to brainstorm ways to work the tutorial elements into the environment.

You, citizen! Pick up that weapon.

It's exciting to be getting back into setting after a few weeks of in-the-weeds technology work and very abstract level design work.

New Enemy AI— Lucien

I've been revamping our enemy AI over the last week! Previously, we built all of our enemies to work entirely using the game's electrical simulation.

Enemies worked like this:

A camera starts seeing a player and flips a switch
...which powers a gimbal, which points at the player and starts letting power through
...which starts charging a capacitor
...which eventually meets the voltage threshold of a relay, allowing power through
...which fires a laser, draining the capacitor until it's below the threshold
and repeat!

This has a major flaw: how do you make interesting enemies with this system? While it was very neat that we could have enemy AI emerge from how they're constructed, it didn't result in something that was all that fun.

And so this week, I started builting a new foundation for enemy AI that's way more game-like. Enemies still use the equipment attached to them and take advantage of the game's simulation, but now they can choose how often they shoot, when they move or retreat, and whether they retaliate against other enemies that damage them.

Enough talk. Look at this pretty moving picture!

A horribly violent room

There's still a lot more to do, but the new AI has already proven to be much more fun to play against!

Hexapod Prototype— Rasmus

I've been working on a hexapod enemy. It's just a figment of an animation in Blender so far.

It walks! It talks! It can fetch you a drink!

Looking Ahead

We've been working on polishing up a lot of our existing game assets to get rid of some of the grids. We're also starting to nail down more and more of the setting, which I'm super excited to share!

Next week is a playtest week, and our focus will be on AI and all of the shiny new art.

See you all on the far side!

SSH #17 — A Jolt to the System

2025-05-17T16:00:00Z

Happy Saturday! It's time. It's always time. But now, specifically, it's time for your weekly news on MEANWHILE IN SECTOR 80!

Last time, Lucien highlighted recent work on combat feedback, elevators and a stadium level.

This week, we have new physics!

Jolt Physics— Lucien

We had an internal playtest this Friday, with one of the oh-so-exciting headline features being the port to Jolt Physics. It's taken ages and has sucked butt to work on — but the results are worth it! All of our physics run more than twice as fast, you don't get stuck inside stuff anymore.

There's this sick toggle to switch physics engines at runtime, which is totally unique as far as game engines go and also not that useful.

The good, the bad, and the ugly — all available at the click of a button.

Drop Pod Detail— Laura, Harry

Laura is still chipping away at the drop-pod slab, creating a detailed model to replace our current greybox asset. Soon the player will be travelling (read: hurtling down onto planets at high speed) in style!

We've moved on from the greybox pods we stole from that man in Kellogg, Idaho.

Physics, Lasers and Turtles— Harry

Hello, mechanical minions of the Second Half Games Newsletter!

It's Friday! PLAYTEST DAY TODAY.

This time, WE ARE USING A NEW PHYSICS ENGINE — JOLT! The game runs significantly smoother as a result. We can build bigger levels and fill them with even more enemies and loot before the CPU starts to scream from all the physics calculations. And the player doesn't keep getting stuck in walls and floors!

There has been a worrying increase in instances of the player getting stuck on their back like a turtle though. Nothing a little on-the-fly dismantling can't fix.

They sat like this for three hours before a rescue team arrived and towed them away.

Lucien's spent some time this week making enemies function a little more like the player. This means the gimbles that evil crab droids use to target you can be looted and added to your player. You can then equip and aim them yourself - potentially tripling your laser output!

Killer robot in mirror is closer (and faster) than they appear.

I filled 'the Stadium' with enemies and terrain too, hoping to create an open environment that needed you to balance a jumping puzzle with loot choices and long ranged combat. I didn't really account for all the weight of the components on the player though, so it's back to the drawing board.

Take that, evil shapes!

Burgers for dinner.

Be good!

Looking Ahead

We're all enjoying a wave of relief after the move onto Jolt Physics. The next big thing for us is to start working on our first real gameplay environment. We've begun conceptual work for the very first section of the game, figuring out how to onboard new players to MEANWHILE IN SECTOR 80.

Lucien also has an absolute mountain of notes after our internal playtest. Naturally, the shift from one physics engine to another has brought a few bugs that need to be fixed, but so far nothing too major.

In the last few weeks we've also put a lot of thought into ways to improve combat, and it's time to give the player some more loot variety.

SSH #16 — Elevated Spirits

2025-05-10T16:00:00Z

Happy Saturday! It's time, as it often is, for news about MEANWHILE IN SECTOR 80! Wishlist us on Steam and join our Discord server to stay up to date — we'd love to see you!

This post was written and edited by Lucien with sections written by Harry.

Last time, Harry wrote his first post for the blog and caught us up on combat, art direction, and technical updates.

This week, we've got stuff!

Damage Feedback— Lucien

I've been thinking about improving feedback during combat, especially to help figure out if changes to your build result in doing more damage. I implemented a new mechanic — damage popups!

2, 27, 55! 9,000!

Elevators!— Rasmus, Harry

We're taking things to the next level.

I hope the news I have to share will uplift all of you.

Things are really escalating at Second Half Games today.

You're getting three puns - that's all you're getting. Lucien will hurt me if I add more. If you come up with any, you should definitely send them to him directly. Escalating doesn't really even work - that's an entirely different thing.

Physically-based elevators!

During playtesting, we realised just how many staircases our poor old player character has to run up when they're leaving a level. Think of their creaky robo-knees! So - elevator time! Rasmus has put together an elevator system that we can adjust for speed and height to fit whatever space we need to use it in! I'm excited to use these in some new levels.

Welcome to the Stadium!— Harry

Hello, soot-covered(?) lamps(?) of the Second Half Games Newsletter!

I tried to crowdsource mad-lib it that time. Might not do that again.

It's Friday! It is still May! Still another week at Second Half.

Lucien is back! He's been busy. We've all been glad that he's back. I think he's glad he's back too.

No playtest today. We're pushing it back one more week to keep up the work on moving our physics over to Jolt. This gives me more time to work on levels.

Here's a little screenshot of one I've been working on this week. I'm sure there's some way we can get some kind of football working. Maybe with explosions.

Editor's note: MS80 is not a soccer game, despite persistent rumors otherwise

I still have to fill it with lots of other things, particularly breaking it up into multiple floors and sections to create better combat encounters.

Stew for dinner.

Be good!

Looking Ahead

I had a week-long break last week and like Harry mentioned, I'm very glad to be back!

We've got a playtest next week, where we'll finally be onto Jolt Physics! I've been telling the team that it'll fix a ton of problems for weeks at this point and I'm excited for us to finally switch it on by default.

SSH #15 — Crab Food

2025-05-03T16:00:00Z

It's Saturday — that means it's time for your (mostly) regularly scheduled news about MEANWHILE IN SECTOR 80! Wishlist us on Steam and join our Discord server to stay up to date — we'd love to see you!

Last time, we built some new pipe and electronic props and introduced the electrical fan!

Our more recent focus has been: combat!

Combat

In the last two weeks, we've continued to experiment with new level layouts and enemy combinations to see what kind of combat encounters can be fun and challenging. My favourites are these tiny crab droids with an electrical shock stick mounted on the front — they rush you like metal desert lizards, moving like greased lightning to inflict you with deadly electric poison.

They aren't much trouble on their own, but face off against 9 of them charging you down a hallway and you can't run or hide!

The robotic circle of life is a beautiful thing.

We had a brainstorm session on Tuesday (there was a slideshow presentation and everything) examining how different game genres handle "the flow" of combat. Whatever decisions we make going forward, we need to carefully mix level shapes with different combinations of enemies — ideally moving between engagement ranges and heights to keep combat exciting.

That means no more endless hallways of death, and making sure the player always has some sort of goal in any room they enter — be it loot or survival!

If all else fails, there's always lasers.

We're really feeling that our current box of toys for weapon and enemy variety is a little limited, so we've dedicated some time to invent weird and wonderful new items for the player (and their foes) to wield. Hopefully we'll have more on this to show you in the coming weeks!

We're having a lot of fun imagining how weird we can go. Lucien is gripped by an unusual springtime Jingle Bells fever, and insists we need to create a rhythm minigame weapon that rewards you for playing the tune properly. I've broken three crowbars trying to extricate him from his office already.

Dragger Revamp— Rasmus

Our dedicated maths-wizard and evil scientist, has been hard at work improving our dragging technology. Here's what he had to say:

Dragging parts around is a core mechanic of our game. It is important that this is intuitive and easy to do. A tricky case is to place a part into a hole or a slot. Sockets snap to each other but it can be hard to fit a part into a tight spot when there isn't anything to snap it to. I am working on some improvements to make this easier. The old behavior places the part on the nearest surface that it touches, avoiding occlusions. The new behavior places the part on the surface that the mouse cursor touches, allowing occlusions.

Box stacking has never felt so good!

The Player's Home Ship— Laura

Laura's done more work with environment lineart in Blender, seeing how our player's new home ship turns out!

Home sweet home.

This is part of a shiny new overhaul for the home ship in preparation for our big Steam page update — including all that we've changed about MEANWHILE IN SECTOR 80 over the last 5 months. This should be one of the game's first seriously polished pieces of content, and since the player is in here so often as they move between levels, we're hoping you like it!

Laura has also been working on a new shape for the drop pod, adding a significant amount of detail to the layout and appearance of the pod as we commit to our player's main form of transportation. Hopefully more on that next week!

Looking Ahead

Work continues on moving our physics library over from Rapier to Jolt. We're all excited to see how it feels to move around and fight in Jolt, and hoping it resolves some issues with the player clipping through walls and floors in the middle of intense firefights.

We've scheduled our next big internal playtest for two weeks from now. I'm aiming to make a new level that prevents the player from corner-peeking and hiding behind doors in combat encounters, with the goal being to try and encourage more risk taking and mobility under fire.

SSH #14 — Triskaidekaphobia

2025-04-12T16:00:00Z

Happy Saturday!

It's time for some news about MEANWHILE IN SECTOR 80!

Last week, I revolted against the forces of the universe, so we didn't have a Saturday post! It felt great to unwind, relax, and express my radical freedom.

Over the past two weeks, we've been fleshing out mechanics and building more stuff than you'd ever believe!

Kits & Props— Laura

We've been building an array of new kit pieces to make it easier for us (mostly Harry) to make new levels. One of those new kits is a set of square pipes that snap together!

Imagine what you could build with all these pipes! Probably pipes!

Just like the kits we're using for building levels, the pipe kit fits in several different ways, enabling us — or you, with our built-in level editor — to build the pipe sculptures of your wildest dreams.

The fluid contained within the pipes is mysterious and important.

Laura has also put together a few new props to help liven up (read: clutter) our playtest levels. This gives the player some much-needed furniture to cower behind when the killer robots come for them. If only we could all be so lucky.

I bet the people who used to work here complained very vocally about the quality of the equipment the company provided.

We were all surprised as a team at how much better a room can look when it's full of little clutter bits!

It's like a disembodied IKEA but for scientific equipment.

A Good First Project: Fans!— Spencer & Rasmus

We've been fortunate to have a wonderful new person join our team for a bit: Spencer! As someone who's used the major commercial game engines in anger, he's had awesome feedback on our tools and APIs available for gameplay programming.

As his first project, Spencer designed and created a revamped electric fan part, which has all sorts of uses!

A homegrown flight system! It's a bit like that one superhero, [REDACTED].

Leafblower Simulator 2025, the hit game from Second Half Games, coming to a game store near you.

I bet you've played a video game with this puzzle before. If you haven't, maybe you can play ours? 🥺👉👈

Rasmus was clutch in assisting in the surprisingly complicated Fan Math. At the same time, we took the opportunity to revamp our heat system so that the fans could also be used for cooling.

The squeeze is worth the juice!

Looking Ahead

Next week, we have a short week on account of the Easter-related holidays coming up. We're all excited for the long weekend. Before that though, we'll be assembling a bunch of wonky off-grid levels, finishing porting the game to Jolt Physics (oOoOoOo), and beginning our plan to revamp our geriatric Steam page.

As always, you can check us out on Steam and you can join our thriving Discord community to get the latest news.

SSH #12 — A Place to Call Home

2025-03-29T16:00:00Z

Happy Saturday!

It's time for some news about MEANWHILE IN SECTOR 80! As always, you can check us out on Steam — wishlists help a lot! — and you can join our thriving Discord community to get the latest news and send us memes.

Last week, we built some modular kit pieces and did some important-but-boring planning.

This week, we've been firing on all cylinders! We've got polished core mechanics, a home ship, new puzzles, and slick editor features!

The New Home Ship— Harry & Laura

Laura's been working on a new version of our player's home ship. Until now the player has been living out of a square box so it's time for an upgrade!

The drop pod comes up through the floor now

The new ship is playing with more complex wall shapes, and splits the space into a level-selection map room and a drop-pod chamber. The drop-pod is actually under design review at the moment, as we decide whether a drop pod is really the way we want the player to reach levels.

There's a light now!

Lucien is of the opinion that we should cut a hole in the floor of the ship so the player can just 'auto-defenestrate'. Still in the workshopping phase, clearly.

A screenshot of BLENDER 4.2.6 LTS

Core Mechanical Polish— Lucien

After the most recent playtest, we ended up with a big list of feedback on our core mechanics. I focused on fixing as much of that stuff as possible this week before moving onto all the new stuff.

We've got a new hit feedback effect!

Imagine the player cries out in pain with every hit. Oof! Oof! Oof!

This is where I would put videos for all the other fixes, but I've only just realized that none of them make for interesting videos. Damn.

Really quickly then, before I lose you: I fixed a bunch of bad collision cases, made the character controls snappier and jumpier, revamped our death mechanic, added animation interpolation between ticks and fixed key items getting broken by enemies and becoming useless. Whew!

Weighted Buttons— Rasmus

We now have weighted buttons to use for physics puzzles! We can easily tune them to control how much weight is needed to make them activate.

Have you ever played the fairly obscure game named "Portal"?

The Editor Improves— Eryn

We have a custom editor built into the engine that we're shipping with the game! That means that players get the same tools that we're using to build the game, which is something we're very excited about.

Eryn built a bunch of new features this week:

Add Entity Menu (Shift+A) — Can choose either prefabs or models. After selection, you automatically enter transform mode on the new object(s)
Duplicate Selection (Shift+D): Duplicates in-place, and directly enters transform mode on the selection. Just like Blender!
Stamp Button (hold Alt): Holding Alt while in transform mode and confirming the operation will place down the selection, create a duplicate, and re-enter transform mode again. This mode also retains your selected axis if you had one.
Axis Select (middle mouse): Just like Blender, you can now additionally press middle mouse to enter quick axis select mode regardless of which transform mode you're in (move, rotate, scale)

Check out this cool highlight video:

You get a new tool! And you get a new tool! And YOU...

Looking Ahead

It was a good week! I'm excited to switch to building new gameplay bits next week in preparation for the team playtest on Friday.

See you next week!

SSH #11 — Kangaroo Production

2025-03-22T16:00:00Z

Happy Saturday!

Last week, we unveiled our upgraded art style, featuring line art!

This week, we've been working on modular kits, gameplay polish, and everybody's favorite passtime: product planning.

Dragger Polish— Rasmus

There are now white contours when hovering over parts. They show a preview of dragging so that you know in advance all the parts that would be disconnected by starting a drag operation.

This uses the new outline system, which we'll be using for even more stuff in the future!

Building Kits— Harry & Laura

Hello, adjective nouns of the Second Half Games Discord Server!

Another biweekly playtest today - we didn't think we'd made many changes these last two weeks, but turns out some of our power tuning has done very weird things, to the extent that firing too powerful a laser will totally drain you of battery. Just goes to show why we need to keep playtesting regularly.

A few things were broken that weren't broken last time we playtested.

Something that is new though is we've been spending a lot of time learning how game levels are made by various studios! Particularly - Bethesda's use of modular kits. There's some great GDC talks out there that explain how and why studios go modular with their level design tools, and we think something similar is the right move for MS80. This lets us more efficiently create a variety of levels with different themes in our Cyrtanthus engine.

This level kit is called the "Kangaroo Kit". Ask us why!

Here's a screenshot of the new kit that Laura put together this week, with the emissive red sections showing back-faces that aren't rendered in-game. Also, something very rough that I'm still working on to test the versatility of our new kit, inspired by a level from another game that features a good mix of horizontal and vertical spaces with clear player-flow.

Feeling the urge to throw jars of dubious liquid at people

Spaghetti carbonara for dinner.

Be good!

Production Planning— Lucien

I've worked on and scheduled work for software engineering teams. It turns out that production scheduling for a video game is way harder. It involves coordinating art, programming, writing, sound design, marketing, and so much more!

We've had a "roadmap" and a "production schedule" for some time, but they've always been of debatable utility and we've mostly worked week-to-week.

You know what they say: aim for the moon, land on the roof!

No more! I've been working this week on a proper internal roadmap. No plan survives contact with the enemy, but it's a heck of a lot better than driving on the freeway with sunglasses on at night. We've also been receiving some consulting on game production that's been immensely helpful.

Please enjoy the following image equally as much as the prior images.

Your outie enjoys writing planning documents.

Within the roadmap, we've got specific goals that have measurable, achievable outcomes that are relevant to the overall game direction delivered on a given timeframe. They're SMART!

This is a cry for help. Please let me out. I miss writing funny gameplay features.

Looking Ahead

We're plugging along. I've got a pile of feedback from the playtest to plug into our internal issue tracker for the team to start work on next week. I don't really want to do that. I think I'm going to go play video games instead.

See you next week!

SSH #10 — The Lineman Cometh

2025-03-15T16:00:00Z

Happy Saturday! And not even like the last time I said that, it's actually Saturday still!

It's time for some news about MEANWHILE IN SECTOR 80!

Last week, we worked up to a big playtest and had a bunch of fun playing the game.

This week, we're unveiling our new art style. In one word: lines!

Line Art!

Laura has been experimenting with line art as a way to give the game a more unique look and also improve readability of a lot of the parts. She painted a bunch of concepts within the last couple weeks on top of screenshots of the game.

A mockup from the Third Schwartz-Mocker Friendship Dam

We had a chat this week about what the lines mean, which made them suddenly sound easy and fun to implement, so I did!

Ka-pow!

You can click on these images to view them at full resolution. I've left them huge and uncrunched so you can see the full detail!

Images taken seconds before disaster

We really like how much the lines make enemies pop out from the environment.

Our style is coming together!

I'm proud to say it: I think we're zeroing in on a proper — capital A, capital S — Art Style. We've come a long way from the vision of the game I had in mind circa gamescom and MEANWHILE IN SECTOR 80 is better for it.

Here's a little video where you can see the lines in motion:

I'm pretty sure I've got hundreds of videos in this same stairwell.

Regulated Battery Voltage— Rasmus

Our batteries have gotten smarter and now regulate the voltage with Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) instead of internal resistance. This makes it easier to tune stuff as they will draw just as much power as you say they will as long as the batteries are rated for it. When the batteries are insufficient, stuff will draw exactly what the batteries can provide.

It was a bit tricky to get this working well together with capacitors and batteries with different voltages but it was well worth it!

Before, even though we have enough power, the voltage is sagging and we're under-powering this laser.

After the change, our voltage is staying at 24V and we're getting full discharge from the batteries!

Globally Illuminating

There are some weeks where I am very thankful that we have a custom engine. We can build so many specialized, powerful tools, and it's easy to reason about the entire system whenever we run into bugs.

Other weeks, I'm reminded that we've signed up to complete an absolutely herculean task. Shipping a game is already hard enough, but building everything underneath it is insane.

Nonetheless, we've been plugging away at a few cool rendering improvements!

First up, our real time GI solution is starting to look like GI! It's still not merged into the main branch of the game but it's very satisfying to see colored light bounce off of surfaces in a couple very specific scenarios.

Red and blue light reflect off of this oddly positioned mushrooms.

Random Performance Improvements

Besides the GI implementation, I made our SSAO implementation over 10 times faster this week. There's an old adage that if you make something 2 times faster, you probably started doing something clever, but if you make something 100 times faster, you probably stopped doing something stupid.

Unfortunately, it was the latter. C'est la vie d'un idiot.

A Brand New Renderer

Our graphics stack is based on wgpu. It's a Rust library that provides a nice cross-platform graphics API that's safe, modern, and fast, but higher level than the APIs it runs on like Vulkan or D3D12.

wgpu has gotten us really far and I'm glad we started the engine using it. I'm not much of a graphics programmer and so it was a really awesome way to get things off the ground. If you're looking to get into graphics, I highly recommend it!

That said, we're starting to outgrow it. wgpu's main focus is on safety, and as we've accumulated a number of native extensions, we've started falling more and more outside of the target audience for the library. That's fine, but it means that sooner or later, we'll likely need to start taking on our own graphics abstraction.

So, this weekend, I started on a dedicated Vulkan renderer! It turns out it's not that hard. Here's where I got after around a day of work:

This image is probably a good PNG compression stress test

All of the geometry streaming and plumbing is done! All that's left is a little bit less rainbow, fixing some distortion, some textures, and plugging the rest of the shaders in. It's been surprisingly smooth!

When I was at Roblox, I worked with someone named Arseny Kapoulkine. He's well-known in the graphics programming space and is the kind of person who can write a whole new renderer for a new graphics backend for an existing game in a single weekend. Arseny's always been someone I look up to and that kind of talent was a big inspiration to finally take this project on in earnest.

Looking Ahead

Overall, it was a bit of a slow week. Most of the team has been enjoying some time with family or otherwise working on life stuff.

Next week, it'll be time to focus on our next set of production goals and build up to another team playtest.

See you all next week!

SSH #9 — Daylight Savings Vortex

2025-03-10T16:00:00Z

Happy Saturday! Uh... oh. It's Monday?

Daylight Savings Time happened and somehow we've lost two whole days? Shit. Alright, well.

Happy Monday — it's time for some news about MEANWHILE IN SECTOR 80!

Last week, we focused on building up to a big team playtest with a ton of new mechanics.

This week (can I still stay that if it's Monday?), we had that playtest and it was AWESOME! Let's get to it!

VFX Experiments— Laura

Hey everyone, we're looking into upgrading our VFX and messing around with EmberGen this week!

Multi-channel flipbooks, oh my!

Physics Puzzles— Rasmus

I have been working on physics joints to enable us to make more physics puzzles! Here is a bridge with a hinge and two cables to hold it up.

With physics, the possibilities are endless!

The Big Playtest

On Friday, a long-awaited (two weeks) team playtest happened. I'd been shaking in my sandals hoping that all of the mechanics I'm betting on would turn out fun.

It was a blast! Instead of writing six or seven thousand words, here are a few short clips.

The first death: Laura

Most of the clips are from Laura — she recorded the full playtest complete with team commentary. There's a lot of laughter and a little bit of screaming.

Swarm of little shock bots

Everyone had different strategies approaching combat. I tried to blast the enemies to bits as quickly as possible, while other folks were more surgical to try to keep as many parts intact as possible.

Sniper battle

All of the enemies in this playtest were quadruped walkers of different sizes and power levels, equipped with several different weapons.

An extended engagement with a pack of tier one bots

Enemies are made of the same parts as the player and respond dynamically as they're busted apart!

Blasting enemies at a T junction

I wanted to spend a lot of time carefully placing enemies and loot and pickups this week. I didn't. It was still pretty good, and a few of the enemy placements got people good!

Unlocking a new part of the level with a special item

The build had a little bit of progression, where we visited The Dreaded McRedux in order to find the coordinates of The Third Schwartz-Mocker Friendship Dam, where we found a key to let us progress further into the bunker.

Robot gibs everywhere!

It was a lot of fun to speedrun the game's power progression. It's going to be a really interesting challenge to build an interesting curve of progression for players as they travel through the game's worlds.

I died in the last encounter and everyone laughed at me

The Summary with Harry— Harry

Hello, committed followers of the Second Half Games newsletter!

We had our biweekly playtest today. Does biweekly mean twice a week, or once every two weeks? Google tells me it means both, which is unhelpful.

Google is often unhelpful.

What was not unhelpful today was how good we felt after our playtest! Our last one was a bit of a nasty realisation - our game systems didn't make much sense, the combat, looting and extraction loop felt super clunky and unengaging, and we were left questioning what kind of game we were really making.

Well now we aren't! We playtested the New And Improved Dreaded McBunker Redux, featuring new enemies, new player resource management mechanics and a different approach to handling loot.

Carefully aiming to dissect the enemy robots to keep their best parts intact for your own benefit is now well rewarded - but you can just easily go in all lasers blasting and revel in the destruction all the same. We all get our own rewards.

It's early days yet still with the Dam level, though we did get to explore and play part of it today too. We've got a clear set of priorities for the coming weeks, with a pressing need to keep sharpening our core mechanics and exploring level design options.

Italian lentil soup for dinner.

Be good!

Looking Ahead

I spent the entire weekend unwinding. Truth be told, I was pretty stressed about the number of changes that we were making this week and whether it would all fit together.

The last playtest was really tough. It felt like the game had moved from "tech demo with potential" to "a bad game." Some friends of mine have reassured me that this is how it goes for the development of some games. Nonetheless, we made it, the game felt awesome, and we've got a great list of things to follow up on and polish!

Next week (this week.) is going to be all about fixing bugs, improving tools, and refining things that we've got.

See you all next week! (later this week)

SSH #8 — The Ides of February

2025-03-01T16:00:00Z

Happy Saturday — it's time for some news about MEANWHILE IN SECTOR 80!

Last week, we polished up the world and made some cool VFX.

This week, we worked on adding some texture to the game: new location concepts, a sound revamp, and a brand new combat loop!

Most of that isn't quite ready to share though, so this post is a little shorter than normal. 😄

New Playtest Cadence

Up until this point, we've been running playtests every week. That's too frequent, so we're moving our weekly internal playtests to be fortnightly. After a few more of those, we're planning on running a friends and family playtest. Stay tuned!

Global Illumination Experiments— Lucien

The game currently applies sky light to all objects. When the game is mostly outdoors, like it was around a year ago, that's totally fine! But now that we've been building more interiors, it's important to start modeling light in a better way.

Enter: Global Illumination!

This week, we started trying to use the new-ish software RT pipeline to compute sky visibility. There are a lot of artifacts and it's a little slow. But still, it's light outside and dark inside!

it's light outside and dark inside

The video uses an evenly spaced 128x128x128 probe grid with 0.5 meter resolution centered on the camera. Each probe shoots 16 rays per frame and accumulates the result using second order spherical harmonics. Even with no special tricks or optimizations, it runs at playable framerates!

There's tons of work to do to make this workable but I'm excited at the thought of how cool this is going to make our environments look.

Hysteresis Relays— Rasmus

These relays act a bit like diodes to prevent charging of batteries. Higher voltage batteries can be connected and boost the player voltage without needing to disconnect old batteries. When the high voltage batteries run out of energy (or the voltage drops because lots of power is used), the old batteries reconnect.

Each battery is isolated and can power the player without damaging the other batteries.

This could be built into the batteries and be the default behavior to make it more convenient to use high voltage batteries.

An Week Summary— Harry

Hello, loyal would-be customers of the Second Half Games newsletter!

It has been An Week at Second Half Games.

Lucien's been playing a lot of Horizon: Forbidden West lately. We've been looking at how that game handles anti-robot violence and sound effects. The robots in that scream when you hurt them! Wow! That was a choice! Three hour video-essay coming shortly.

In continuing the combat overhaul, Lucien has added weak points and armoured points to the game, so damage won't just be constant across the entire enemy's surface. This rewards you for targeting valuable parts of the enemy, like their weapons, batteries or targeting cameras. I'm working on different impact sounds for each of these surfaces, so you should soon get some audible feedback when you are doing critical damage and when you aren't doing damage at all.

At the moment we've got a bit of a hiccup in our sound effects. The sounds for the capacitors you use to charge your weapons are a little too tonal. It sounds like you've got a singing battery strapped to your arm when you shoot. That's neat! We need to fix that. There's a lot more reverb for everything else though! Suitably bunker-esque sound environments with a lot of punch. We're discussing a space mega-mega-church level, just to really dial up that cathedral reverb to 11.

Pizza for dinner.

Be good!

Looking Ahead

Next week, we'll be putting together a ton of small gameplay elements for the next internal playtest. That means new levels, new enemies, new enemy AI, and lots and lots of new engineering mechanics.

Here's a little sneak peak of a contraption I built while testing a mechanic where we vary the player's capabilities based on your main voltage:

My weapon is powered with its own battery, with my arm-switch controlling a relay!

I'm excited also terrified. The only way out is through!

See you all next week!

SSH #7 — Maximum Payne

2025-02-22T16:00:00Z

Happy Saturday — it's time for some news about MEANWHILE IN SECTOR 80!

Last week, we gained new enemies and some pretty new graphics features.

This week, we landed a controls and equipment overhaul and started exploring our first real level, The Dry Dam.

You've Gotta Build Yourself— Lucien

YOU ARE NOW THE WEAPON.

pew pew. pew pew pew

This week we threw away the concept of the multi-tool in favor of building directly onto your robot body. You can bind switches to any mouse button or keyboard key, which has opened up a ton of new options!

It's also fixed one of our core problems: scaling combat beyond a single weapon. Now that you can dual-wield and power everything directly from your body, getting more powerful is much more straightforward.

Dry Dam— Laura

As we're moving into working on a real level, I've started to block out and concept the DRY DAM and the surrounding environment!

Blockout rendered in Blender

Concept paintover

Switch Variants— Rasmus

Switches are now available in more shapes and sizes for creativity and convenience.

Inline switch, OFF

Inline switch, ON

Finding the right switches can make your contraptions more compact and lighter, allowing for faster movement and more loot to be carried!

T and Y Switches

Switch switch switch...

McBunker Glow-Up and Overview— Harry

Hello, obedient citizens of the Second Half Games Newsletter!

Laura has given us a beautiful collection of rocks and rock materials, which lets us easily create varied landscape features. This also means The Dreaded McBunker's surface entrance has had a bit of a makeover. This gorgeous 20 bedroom 47 bathroom property in the formerly-lush Great Misery Basin comes bundled with its own array of automated defences and air conditioning. It could be yours for only 999,999,999,999,999 credits, or for a bargain with the careful use of illegal firearms and an adventurous spirit, you sly robot you.

buy now at fortlauderdalewaterfronthomesforsale.com

Speaking of firearms - what good is a weapon if you don't know the damage you're doing with it? As part of our continued overhaul of combat, Lucien's been hard at work making weapon feedback feel more tangible. Parts hit by weapons now produce sparks proportional to the damage received, with broken parts now glowing yellow - highlighting that they are ripe to be pilfered and repaired aboard your ship.

Don't want to destroy those adorable little crab robots? Take out their weapons module and you've made a new friend that'll follow you around the rest of the map to your heart's content.

(editor's note: I have stolen the video that Harry made for this section because it was way better than my video. I wield my absolute editorial control with extreme violence.)

Spaghetti meatballs for dinner.

Be good!

Looking Ahead

We ran another weekly playtest on Friday! It was an mixed bag — some things got so much better that it uncovered a bunch of other things that we aren't doing so well yet. That was a little tough to process but it's important to remember that this is how game development goes. If all of our playtests were fantastic, we probably aren't learning anything, right?

I think we'll be slowing down our internal playtesting pace to once every two weeks. We're also looking forward to scheduling our first Friends and Family playtest in 6-8 weeks.

See you all next week!

SSH #6 — Every Single Person is my Enemy

2025-02-15T16:00:00Z

Happy Saturday — it's time for some news about MEANWHILE IN SECTOR 80!

Last week, we did a bunch of work around documentation and planning, and made some shiny new high-readability parts.

This week, our main goal was to explore enemy and environment design. We got a little sidetracked with some physics and graphics goodies though, too!

Triplanar Materials— Laura

Say goodbye to the gray stuff - This week we're having some fun with figuring out triplanar materials to get us started on bringing some color into our prototype levels. Featuring: moments before disaster 🐀

The Dreaded McBunker

NOT THE RATS!!

Cable Ropes

Rasmus wanted to see if we could implement physics joints this week, starting with rope joints for cables. We pair-programmed a bit and had that done in just a couple hours. Easy peasy!

Check out this new fast travel system I invented.

Creepy Crawly Enemies— Lucien

We've gotten surprisingly far with our spread of Scooby-Doo villains we've used as enemies, but they've officially entered retirement this week.

I think this was one of the episodes from the 80's.

I committed to making four new mechanical enemies this week. I made five! ...or like, one and a half, depending on how you count.

Eryn modeled the cool walker frames. I made the purple gimbal parts.

You can break individual parts on the enemies to disable them. Their behavior is dynamic based on what's broken or missing, so they can be blinded, disarmed, immobilized, or picked apart.

The new enemies are made of the same parts the player uses, so they double as loot! Or maybe your loot is made of enemies.

We playtested the new enemies on Friday; more on that later.

Normals— Rasmus

The computation of normals in the engine was correct most of the time but there were a couple of issues that came into play when non-uniform scaling was applied. To fix these, I added a test object and a new debug mode to render normals. While fixing these issues I also took the opportunity to compute tangents on the fly in the fragment shader. This means we don't need to store tangents in the vertex data anymore.

their barbarous wastes

our blessed homeland

Darkening Corners with SSAO

With the old greybox grid gone from the McBunker, the game's flat lighting started really sticking out. I was supposed to be working on some new enemies this week, but I couldn't help but try getting us a little screen space ambient occlusion.

I scaffolded out some plumbing and laid the trap.

And now we wait...

Lo and behold, I woke up the next day and Rasmus had solved all of the hard parts! We did a little pair programming to fix a few edge cases and do some tuning, and...

Look at those creases! The tasteful darkening of the corners.

By the way, you can click images to see them at full resolution!

The old hoverbike and depot from the gamescom demo

Loot from the Dreaded McBunker

The current SSAO implementation uses a lot of samples and is pretty naive. I think at some point we'll evaluate GTAO or GT-VBAO, but for now, we've got it tuned well enough to move on with our lives.

The Weekly Playtest

On Friday, we ran a playtest of all of the new stuff. We're starting to do that every week, so that we can gather feedback and iterate super quickly as a team.

We've struggled with making the game's combat fun. It's been tough to square the super freeform engineering and physics with making tight third person shooter controls. If you played the demo at gamescom or on Steam last year, you know what I mean.

The main portion of the playtest this week was to see if just adding new enemies would improve our combat. Check 'em out in context:

The laser turrets were quite effective

I'm proud of some of the enemy placements designed to jumpscare the team.

Pew pew pew!

I was able to make several enemy variants using the different weapon parts we already had in the game. That felt like a pretty big win.

The shock bots run fast and are super scary

So, the original hypothesis: do more interesting enemies "fix" our combat? Nope! Not on their own, at least.

We struggled a lot with aiming for specific parts using the game's physics-based weapon controls. A bug I introduced late in the week made the controls even sloppier. I think the enemies are also a little too small.

Overall, we had a lot of fun, and these challenges got the team's gears turning. How can we make combat more interesting? I'm sure we'll figure it out.

Next Week

We've got a major gameplay shakeup cooking for next week. I'm so excited to share that that I've been bouncing off the walls this weekend.

We'll also be focusing on some minor polish and fixing some of the rough edges we've accumulated while prototyping in the last few weeks.

See you all next week!

SSH #5 — Docs & Blocks

2025-02-08T16:00:00Z

Happy Saturday!

Last week, we made some cool new parts and tech prototypes in a short week. It was really nice to have a little mid-week break as part of our committment to zero burnout.

This week, we built a ton of little things to bring the game together just in time for a Friday team playtest of the new game loop!

Here's the weekly news, delivered directly from each member of our team:

Player Polish— Laura

We spent some time this week working on polishing up our new player character!

The player character is a wide boi

Capacitor Makeover— Rasmus

The capacitors have gotten a make over! The colored bands on the bottom indicate the rated voltage while the emissive parts indicate the voltage they have been charged to. As the capacitor is drained, the voltage will drop and the emissive bands will change colors and eventually fade to black.

The spread

Partly discharged

Fully discharged

Editor Tooling— Eryn

Outside of less exciting art pipeline improvements and bug fixing, I've been working on improving our editor tools.

Support for multi-select (just the translate tool for now), along with customizable pivot points: Median point, Primary selection, or Individual origins. Axis display gizmo in the top right of the screen, so the hotkeys mentioned in my previous post (pressing G-X moves selection along the X axis) are easier to find.

The axis display is relative to your transform orientation, so it will display your selection's local rotations when in local mode.

The new tools have let us build crazy levels super quickly!

You might notice in the video that it's a little warped. This is because of perspective distortion. That's because the gizmo is actually a 3D object, and it's just attached to the camera. It's good enough to use for now, but in the future, we are going to add different "render layers" so that we can have other 3D worlds as part of the UI, like the "talking head" frames many RTS games have. We can use that to fix the perspective distortion eventually.

Last and also least, I added a little orange dot to indicate the origin point of your selection.

This is all part of a larger effort to make our engine's tools as familiar as possible with Blender, our main modeling program. The goal is that all team members will have transferrable muscle memory between the tools and are able to feel productive in both tools.

Production Production Production— Harry

Hello, valued readers of the Second Half Games newsletter!

We have a Game Design Document now! A real one! With cool colours and bullet-point lists! We're, like, a real studio!

The GDD looks like this, but less blurry

Anyway - we like to have a team 'Play and Watch' every Friday, just so we can properly mine a piece of science fiction media for inspiration. But this week, we also took some time to playtest our own game!

Through Lucien's intermission and drop-pod scenes, we now have a playable game loop. This means we can travel between levels, extract with loot, and respawn if we die.

Look at all those new parts! This was about half way through the playtest run.

Here's a video of me finding out what a railgun tripwire trap is, courtesy of Rasmus. Hours of fun.

Watch out!!

We're still playing around with drop pod shapes. We stole them from a man in Kellogg, Idaho and the game randomises which one you get. My favourite is the one with an ensuite bathroom.

Are YOU in the market for a new DROP POD?
COME on down to the GREYBOX POD SHOWROOM in KELLOGG, IDAHO
PODS! ᵖᵒᵈˢ! ᴘᴏᴅs! 𝓅𝑜𝒹𝓈

And just because I like you, have an extra screenshot showing the new laser bolt-casters, batteries and capacitors.

Bonus bonus bonus!

Pork chops for dinner.

Be good!

Running Wild— Lucien

This week was a lot of fun and I did a bunch of different stuff!

I worked on writing the Game Design Document with Harry, as well as a snazzy Game Content Document with all of the key parts we're working on.

There are also a few technical improvements to the engine, like a new depth pre-pass to reduce overdraw and enable some effects like SSAO.

That's a lot of overdraw!

That's not a lot of overdraw!

On Friday, I implemented a flurry of mechanics to complete the prototype of our new game loop. There's a thing to launch the pod! You can die and come back to loot your old stuff! There are demented levels from Harry and I to play!

Launch Pod or Lunch Pod?

The next major milestone for us is to leave pre-production and enter the vertical slice phase of development. We're aiming to have a single environment, a few small levels, and a representative slate of parts and enemies to mess with. Updates soon!

Next Week

Next week, we'll be thinking a lot about combat and enemy design. It's a weak point in the game so far and something we haven't given a lot of design thought to.

We're also going to be nailing down the scope of the vertical slice and making some hard choices about what content we're going to make fit!

See you all next week!

SSH #4 — RTX ON

2025-02-01T16:00:00Z

Happy Saturday!

Last week, we had our first full week back on MS80, and took a lot of inventory of features as we wrap up the pre-production phase of the game.

This week, we were off on Tuesday and Wednesday for Lunar New Year! We spent the rest of the short week doing some art and tech experiments.

New Batteries & Capacitors

Laura and Rasmus worked together on a new design for the game's batteries and capacitors! They communicate the voltage level of the object as well as its capacity and current charge super clearly.

This is part of our push to reimagine our art style with simpler materials.

Laura designed some new batteries and Rasmus built them!

Rasmus also built some new variants of switches. One of them is useful for toggling between two different power sources, like for switching voltages.

This switch can toggle between two power sources.

The other variant is a new switch model with a rocker. It changes color based on its state and has the traditional "I" and "O" labels for on and off.

We're experimenting with different visuals for manual switches.

Friday Game Designing— Harry

Hello, dedicated denizens of the Second ~~Horse~~ Half Games Blog.

We took a couple of days off this week for the Lunar New Year. Today has been pretty productive though, and the team came together for our big weekly sync and we've given ourselves some goals for next week!

One of them is to revive our hitherto somewhat-neglected Game Design Document, and to turn it into something that we maintain much more regularly and can better integrate tasks with. This is a good thing for a number of reasons, not least being it'll give us (and hopefully, you!) a better sense of progress as we continue development.

I also made a new test level. It's called the Dreaded McBunker. It is an underground bunker and it is dreadful. Too dreadful to even show you an image of. Please imagine a dreadful bunker, and then commit that idea to paper via writing implement of your choice and mail it to us in what way seems best to you.

In more interesting news, Laura has been working on a new look for our player character, P! Hopefully more on that later.

Cake for dinner.

Be good!

RTX ON— Lucien

In between doing important things like filing taxes, I kickstarted a fun tech project this week: raytracing! We know that we'll need some sort of solution for global illumination in the game but I hadn't thought very deeply about it.

I watched Tomasz Stachowiak's fantastic talk on rendering in Tiny Glade, another game written in Rust, and was inspired to take a crack at getting software raytracing implemented in the engine. It turned out to be really easy!

Rasmus and I pair programmed a quick software raytracer using the same Rust crate as Tiny Glade, obvhs. We were able to trace some simple scenes and write them to images in about an hour:

Visualized normals of a simple raytraced scene.

Wow! "Lighting!"

On Friday and Saturday, feeling the rush of how easy the CPU work was, I ported the raytracer to the GPU using the sample code from DGriffin91's Tray Racing benchmark. Everything mostly worked out of the box, after a little work massaging the two-level BVH support.

Here's The Cauldron from the gamescom demo, raytraced with 1 ray per pixel:

RTX ON!

That's over 8 million rays per frame, against our full LoD 0 geometry. It takes about 2.5ms on a 3070 at 4K! That's way more rays than we need to build a diffuse lighting approximation, so I'm extremely happy with the result.

Okay, so the regular renderer looks better, but that's not THE POINT.

In theory we could get some big performance improvements by using hardware raytracing, like Nvidia RTX, but then we'd lose a lot of hardware support and we don't need the extra performance right now.

Next Week

For Harry and I, the big task next week is to revive and finish our Game Design Document. Not having a real document for the team to unify around has been a pretty big snag for the team, and I'm excited to fix that.

Laura will be working on polishing our new character prototype as well as finishing some art direction and material exploration we've been doing. I'm excited for everyone to see that stuff because it's fantastic!

Eryn has been finishing up some major editor features and will be starting to work on gameplay code with me and Rasmus. It'll be good to get out of the tech jungle and get to focus on gameplay again.

See you all next week!

SSH #3 — Back off the Horse

2025-01-25T16:00:00Z

Happy Saturday!

Last week, we had a great time creating a goofy game from scratch in a week, Shanty of the Stallion.

This week, we've mostly been taking inventory of everything as we work towards making a vertical slice of Meanwhile in Sector 80 over the next couple months.

Getting Over It In Sector 80— Harry

It's been a quiet week at Second Half. Most of us are still recovering from the physical and emotional experience that was Horse Jam 2025.

Some nights, I wake up in cold sweats, hearing crab rave music before a man kicks my bedroom door down and presents me with an angry letter from a music distributor. And then he steals all my teeth.

That isn't to say things haven't been productive this week. Laura has been busy putting together a collection of modular greybox building pieces, which should make creating new levels far more efficient.

Modular building kit build by Laura

I'm still getting used to the editor controls, so I've been playing around with the modular pieces to create affronts to God and/or geometry.

I present to you: Getting Over It In Sector 80

and a little fort thing I made, but that's nowhere near as cool or as fun.

The idea behind these is to integrate them with our new intermission and drop-pod scene, so the player can move seamlessly between different levels. The sooner we get that done, the sooner we can start honing our gameplay loop!

That's all from me this week! Stew for dinner.

Be good!

Getting Over It With Sector 80

The Compound

Lucien Work— Lucien

This week, I had a lot of admin work to do. I worked with Harry to clean up our task tracker, filed a few docs for the company for the year 2025, and tried to pretend that nothing insane was going on in my country.

It was tough to come back from Horse Jam! Going from an absolutely chaotic tiny project back to a larger, planned game was more of a shock than I expected.

On Friday, I managed to check off a mountain of random technical debt tasks I've been sitting on: a new simplified sky model, better texboxes in our editor, and merging our art and code Git repos. All super exciting stuff!

We also playtested Harry's evil parkour level and cool greybox compound. There was a lot of sighing as we fell to our deaths over and over.

What's Next Week?

It's a short week — we'll all be off on Tuesday and Wednesday for Chinese New Year!

My main goal is to start organizing a sequence of levels so that we can recover our full gameplay loop! There's some stuff that's gotta happen on my end, like cleaning up our level transition code, and some stuff that I'm leaving up to Harry and Laura.

See you all next week!

SSH #2 — HORSE JAM

2025-01-20T16:00:00Z

Happy Saturday! (it's actually Monday)

Last week, we kicked off this blog series with an update from every member of the team. The new year has brought us a solid restart!

This week, we had an internal game jam that we called HORSE JAM!

The only constraint was that we had to make a game using our in-house engine in one week, within our normal working hours. Beyond that, we had no theme and no idea what we were going to make until the jam started.

In the end, we made a goofy Oregon Trail/Slay the Spire hybrid called Shanty of the Stallion.

5 days, 5 developers, one weird game idea.

You can play the game right now on itch.io!

You should definitely also join our Discord server where we post about all of the awesome things we're working on regularly.

Prep

Over the weekend, I set up a starter project by cloning our main game's repo and scooping out all of the game-y bits. Cyrtanthus isn't built to be reusable — it's pretty purpose-built for MS80 — so I just copied the folder and trimmed everything out that we probably wouldn't need.

I rigged the project with some fantastic horse-themed placeholder content for folks to stumble into on Monday morning:

The template project we'd build from starting Monday

The title screen played really loud horse noises on loop, too. It was a treat. I am truly one of the greatest minds of my generation.

Monday

For Monday, we only had one goal: figure out what we're making. Laura, Harry, and Rasmus start their days before I do, so I left it up to them to decide.

By the time I rolled in, we had a list of pretty much every game genre, setting, and theme anyone could think of. From there, we started vetoing ideas.

The first idea vetoed? Horses. Big bummer for HORSE JAM 2025, honestly.

In the end, there were a few insanely attractive mashups in the running:

Wizard Cooking Autobattler
Wizard Bowling
Wizard Farming Typing Game
Roguelike Heist Game
Pirate Oregon Trail (with magic!)

There was a debate about wizards versus pirates. The team voted 3-1 in favor of pirates. I really wanted Wizard Bowling.

Rasmus was out for most of the week, so unfortunately we'll never know how he might've voted. Probably Wizard Bowling.

We played a run of Organ Trail, the hit zombie Oregon Trail knockoff with the studio team. The game has hilarious emergent storytelling by the way and I highly recommend it!

Life imitates art.

It was decided. Pirate Oregon Trail. And also a card game with magic. As a bonus, Laura gets to draw a cool pirate map.

By the end of the day, we had a couple mockups and a little bit of art:

CARD GAMES ON BOATS!

There's even a little bit of 3D in there!

Tuesday

On day two, we sorted out roughly what everyone would be working on:

Laura would do most of our art: cool parallax background illustrations, the map, and all our textures.
Harry would build our setting, write everything, and do sound design.
Eryn would create all our models.
Rasmus would fill in and polish stuff where he could, since he was unavailable for part of the week.
I'd code everything up and integrate the rest of the team's work!

We sorted out the game's scope and tried to make it manageable for a week. As everyone knows, scoping a game is incredibly easy.

There'd be a traveling mechanic and a card game, and some way to interlink them. The crew composition would impact what cards you could cast. We'd make a fun and balanced card game with varied encounters and interesting mechanics. No sweat — maybe we should add more stuff!

Everyone on the ship's crew would have a hyper-realistic role on the ship (medic-carpenter hybrid, sorcerers, etc.) and we'd have cards themed after each role.

Laura did a sketch mockup of the player ship and started illustrating some slick parallax scrolling backgrounds.

Now that is a ship.

Illustrating the cards fell to me. I'm not sure how that happened, but it made me realize that I have a lot of latent potential as an artist.

Honestly stunning. I give it a 10/10.

We also gathered a bunch of references. Harry and Laura looked at a few related games and gathered up a bunch of possibilities for mechanics for both the Oregon Trail and card battling sides of the game.

The sails on Chinese junks are so cool

It turns out there are a lot of indie deckbuilder roguelikes

Wednesday

On day 3, things were starting to come together!

Eryn finished our player ship, Laura made some backgrounds, and Rasmus made a sweet water shader overnight. It was starting to look like a game!

That new ship is a lot nicer than the old one!

I add mana costs to the cards to give us some more design flexibility. The card game was fully my responsibility now and it was confusing to play and not very fun.

Laura and Harry carved out the map, encounters, and settings. The player would be a cursed idol that has comandeered a existing pirate ship and set them on a path to take over the world.

We'd get the Oregon Trail-style "name your party" mechanic because of forced amnesia on the crew. Instead of heading to Oregon, you're bound for Dragon's Tooth!

I'm the map, I'm the map, I'm the map, I'm th—

We wanted sirens and sea hags and crab raves! Krakens, navy forts, and uniquely memorable cities! We also only had like two days left.

Thursday

Day 4 — Thursday! Things were coming to a close.

Laura drew the game's incredible map, which really set the stage for the home stretch working on the game.

A hasty working implementation of Laura's mockup of the travel screen.

The travel screen gained working UI with your crew, resources, and some details about your journey.

A hasty working implementation of Laura's mockup of the travel screen.

I added card rewards to the game so that the player could start building a deck. We didn't have a big enough card pool for this to be very powerful yet.

Where did I lift this mechanic from? 🤫

Friday

Friday is the day when pretty much everything came together. All of Eryn's ships came in, Laura finished up the backgrounds, Harry charted our course and wrote limericks to show at the end of the game.

Laura made new textures for some of the ships and Eryn made a square-rigged ship for the first fight.

This encounter is called "Your Former Friends" internally

I scripted the first special encounter, the sirens, with placeholder UI but wasn't certain I'd get around to any of the others.

Special encounters! Well, one of them at least. Sorta.

We had some typos.

They don't think it be like it is, but it do.

Eryn made some awesome ships, including this huge ship of the line inspired by the HMS Victory:

That ship is to scale. It's huge!

The game gained crew naming and role assignment. Your starting deck is based on the roles you have in your crew!

Embarking on the journey.

Eryn also got us our first office pet, a kraken!

UNLEASH THE KRAKEN!

I contributed a very detailed enemy, the iceberg:

I'm not sure why the Titanic didn't just shoot the iceberg.

Bonus Round: Saturday

Every Saturday, I join a nice coworking session with some folks from The Game Collective on Discord. It's a lovely time!

I'd spend the day polishing the game and making sure everyone's work ended up making it into the game. Everyone else would be off for the weekend, so I could add all sorts of silly stuff without anyone noticing until Monday!

I started with some of the special encounters I hadn't gotten around to by Friday. Surely the team wouldn't mind some historical figure cameos!

Are you familiar with Garfunkel the Goblin?

Your crew can experiment with alternate forms of government!

There was a bunch of resource balancing and I added a shop and around a dozen new cards. At this point I was pretty certain I was the funniest person on Earth.

Yes, this excellent card art was all done by me. Commissions are open!

One of the last things we were missing was the Oregon Trail-like random event system. While you're sailing the high seas, sometimes-fortunate events befall the crew. It's a great source of emergent storytelling and sometimes extreme inconvenience.

Mutiny is the most common event and I still haven't figured out why

To make losing a crewmember less punishing, you can fish them up later in the game but they become undead!

Harry had written about a dozen limericks but none of them were visible in the game yet. I added a system that would use them to tell the story of your crew if you won the game.

There once was a great game studio,

Monday: Wrapping Up

After Saturday, I was shot. It was a long week. I didn't even end up writing a "Saturday @ Second Half" post until Sunday night! You're probably seeing this on a Monday, or worse, a Tuesday. Ah well.

We spent Monday cleaning everything up, fixing a bunch of bugs, and expanding on all of the nonsense I did on Saturday.

Overall, Horse Jam 2025 was a success, and a lot of fun! We got to get some practice working as a team, use our normal technology and processes, and get a break from the hard sci-fi we've been soaked in for so long.

You're still here! Go away and play Shanty of the Stallion on itch.io. You can leave a comment to tell us what you think, or join our Discord server!

Saturday @ Second Half #1

2025-01-11T16:00:00Z

Hey all, and happy Saturday!

As we roll into 2025, we're going to try something new: Saturday at Second Half! At the end of every week, we'll round up what everyone on the team has been doing and put it into a nice little post like this one.

We'll keep them short and to the point.

As always, you can wishlist MEANWHILE IN SECTOR 80 on Steam!

Ready? Let's go!

Parts & Doodads— Rasmus

Relays can now work like toggle switches, changing state each time coil voltage goes below to above the activation threshold. This makes it easier to toggle between different weapon functions etc. One toggle relay cycles between two things but three toggle relays can cycle between four things etc.

LEFT. RIGHT. LEFT.

RIGHT. LEFT. RIGHT AGAIN. LEFT AGAIN.

The mouse cursor can now be used for pinpointing things to interact with, such as manual switches. You can use them for turning on/off stuff or combine them with relays to build a selector switch instead of an on/off switch!

Hover over stuff to interact with it!

Editor— Eryn

This week I've been working on improving our engine's editor gizmos, making them align with how Blender's work. You can input chords of hotkeys, just like in Blender, starting with G (move), R (rotate), or B (scale; our engine uses WASD for the camera so this couldn't be S), then followed by an axis (X, Y, or Z), then move your mouse and click to confirm. Pressing the same axis again will switch form World to Local space. The productivity boost of being able to make precise inputs quickly paired with shared muscle memory with our main modeling program seemed like an obvious and easy win.

A demo of the new editor chords

Concept Art— Laura

From the art side, we've been in the process of reworking components as we nail down our new art direction!

New battery concepts

New multi-tool design

Game Loop— Lucien

This week, I put together a prototype of our complete gameplay loop!

Since gamescom, we've made a pivot from a full open world game to an extraction loop with smaller scenes that you visit using a home ship that you can store all your junk on.

In this little clip, I visit some of our team's test scenes, and then drop onto the cauldron level we used in the gamescom demo. It's very fun even when it's so rough!

What's Next Week?

Next week, we're taking a detour to do a studio game jam! We'll be spending the whole week building something totally fresh and different.

Saturday @ Second Half #2 — HORSE JAM

2024-01-20T16:00:00Z

Whoops! I forgot it's 2025 and not 2024. If your browser doesn't automatically redirect you to the correct post, click here.

Saturday @ Second Half #1

2024-01-11T16:00:00Z

Whoops! I forgot it's 2025 and not 2024. If your browser doesn't automatically redirect you to the correct post, click here.

MEANWHILE IN SECTOR 80 is Coming Soon on Steam!

2023-12-05T16:00:00Z

Starting today, MEANWHILE IN SECTOR 80 is Coming Soon on Steam! We aim to enter Early Access in Q4 2024, and work towards a full release from there.

Today also marks the official start of full production on the game. We're very excited to share our progress as we create the game that we've always wanted to play!

Wishlist on Steam

Join us on Discord

Announcement Trailer

Roadmap

We made a roadmap talking about the path ahead and what's in store for the game.

Wishlist on Steam!

MEANWHILE IN SECTOR 80 is now Coming Soon on Steam.

We ran a pre-alpha test!

2023-11-14T16:00:00Z

Over the last month, we ran our first semi-public test for our upcoming game, MEANWHILE IN SECTOR 80. For this test, we decided to only announce it to our Discord community to keep the audience small.

The workshop in the demo we released

We released an initial build on October 7th and then pushed four weekly updates with minor updates to respond to player feedback. It was really fun to work with the community and get feedback on this huge project we've committed to.

Having a deadline to work towards was awesome! It made us get our ducks in a row and streamline a lot of systems in a very short period of time.

What We Learned

We learned a ton about how to run an effective test, as well as what we need to focus on improving.

Cables are cool, but our controls weren't intuitive

The test included a system for connecting objects together with cables. Players had to switch between two different tools, "Move" and "Wire", in order to build contraptions out of parts.

The wire system shipped in the demo

Overall, people really liked the wire system and thought it was fun to build things! However, our cable system had some major issues:

Players did not discover how to disconnect cables
Players thought it was strange that one socket could have multiple cables
It's very clunky to switch between two tools constantly

To remedy all of these issues, we've been working on a new cable system! It works with the same dragger tool that the main building system does, eliminating a modality that we didn't need to have.

Work-in-progress revamped cable system

The new sockets and plugs were modeled by Eryn and are based on the real life CeeForm connector. The models have snazzy animations and it's very intuitive to connect and disconnect cables.

We're going to be using a variety of colors and iconography to make the purpose of each socket clear. We also introduced multiple sizes of socket and plug to make connecting larger machines together easier and make building high power contraptions more interesting.

Players wanted more sandbox activities

A couple days before the demo was due to be released, we created a small story to serve as the game's intro and tutorial. We decorated a desolate planet with some rocks, some monsters, and a workshop for the player to use.

The crash site from the intro scenario

We found that the intro itself was fine, but it lacked a reason for players to build anything interesting with the game's systems. In the future, we're going to invest time to make compelling and repeatable sandbox activities instead of just linear puzzles to solve.

The demo featured a character to serve as the player's guide, W.I.L.S.O.N. It was a great opportunity to inject some fun into a game at risk of being far too bleak and serious.

It was WAY too much fun making W.I.L.S.O.N. — expect to see more of them and perhaps some other characters in the future!

Our next test should be announced publicly

I think we made the right call announcing this demo to a smaller community. It gave us a great mix of people we knew and people we didn't without putting too much of a spotlight on the game yet. The community found a number of technical issues and we're incredibly thankful to everyone for bringing those to our attention!

Our next round of testing is going to be announced publicly to bring in a wider audience!

Closing Notes

We post very frequent updates about MEANWHILE IN SECTOR 80 in our Discord community.

Thank you to everyone who participates in our community and who played this pre-alpha test. We're super excited to share a new build of the game and start another round of testing when we're ready!

MS80 Update #4

2023-09-30T16:00:00Z

Hello! This is the fourth development update for MEANWHILE IN SECTOR 80.

MS80 is an upcoming game about being stranded on an alien planet with nothing but your skills as an engineer and a bunch of random junk.

It's been a couple months since our last update. Since then, we've had our heads down and we've made some great progress on the game.

New Parts!

We've been making all sorts of new parts: railguns, batteries, laser emitters, RTGs, helmets, heatsinks, backpacks, large fusion reactors, giant capacitors, and more!

Nicer UI!

Our UI got a fresh coat of paint and a bunch of new functionality across the board.

We also swapped out our static crosshair for a dynamic 3D crosshair that points exactly where your current weapon is aiming.

In the future, we'll tie features like this to parts, like gimbals, ballistics processors, and helmets with extra targeting information.

Fancy Lighting!

One of the big recent projects was a rework of our lighting. Across the board, we have fuller lighting, better reflections, and a brand new atmosphere model!

Physics!

The physics in the game are ready for primetine! We now accurately simulate conduction, convection, and radiation of heat between all objects in the game. Heatsinks, adhesive, and good design are an important tool to keep stuff cool.

We also improved the colliders on every kind of object in the game, especially noticeable for characters and complicated pieces of equipment.

That's all, folks

That's all for this update!

You can join our Discord server or subscribe to our mailing list to get updates about the game on a regular basis!

MS80 Update #3

2023-07-05T16:00:00Z

Hello, it's Lucien and this is the third update for MEANWHILE IN SECTOR 80.

We've got a bunch of cool new stuff to show off, so let's dive right in.

Engineering System

We've been working hard on what we're calling the Engineering System. It's the set of tools that you, as a futuristic, space-faring engineer use to build and fix things.

At any point, you can hit the TAB key to switch into Engineering Mode. With it, you can inspect any object around you.

Engineers in the MS80 Universe are equipped with telekinetic powers. You can use them to move and rotate objects, like these cubes:

You can also attach objects together in the field with what is basically space-age Blu Tack. It's super helpful to fix things in a pinch.

To take things with you, stick them onto your character! The player collider is currently just a capsule so this looks pretty silly:

At a workbench, your set of engineering tools expands. Here, you can add, remove, and adjust the parts on your equipment. You can see me here fine-tuning the position of this battery.

You can use the wire tool to add or remove wires between sockets located on different pieces of equipment. This laser gun has a power input on the back, and a power output on the front.

Workbenches have a storage board where you can stick parts you aren't using for easy access.

Physics Simulation

We've been steadily improving our physics simulation. We have a new wire network, we simulate thermal radiation and incandescence, and we model adhesives.

Hot objects radiate a lot of energy and glow. In the update video, this laser emitter starts off a dim red, turns orange, white, and then blue once it's really hot.

Most stuff will break or melt or combust long before it gets this hot.

What's Next?

We're starting production for 3D models and audio, some of which has already made it into the game.

Our next milestone is a playable demo! We're polishing the mechanics that we have so that we can get the game into YOUR hands to try it out.

Outro

That's all for this update!

You can join our Discord server or subscribe to our mailing list at secondhalf.games.

Stayed tuned for more updates on MEANWHILE IN SECTOR 80.

MS80 Update #2

2023-06-13T16:00:00Z

Hello, it's Lucien here with the second... not-so-weekly update for MEANWHILE IN SECTOR 80.

We've been remodeling our office the last couple weeks and playing lots of Diablo 4!

We're still finding the best cadence for update videos. It should get easier as we settle back into a normal routine.

Let's talk about what we've been working on for the last couple weeks.

Updated Branding

We've replaced all of the old Zombie Demo Game branding with MS80 branding.

This has really helped us feel like we're working on a real game.

Editor Improvements

Our editor got some major upgrades, including support for multiple selections, attachment editing, and a much improved textbox widget.

Thermodynamics!

MS80 now does basic simulation of thermodynamics, using real SI units.

Heat builds up on components as they operate, and if they get too hot, they can fail.

To test these systems, I added a new turret enemy, inspired by Receiver. You can use the laser to melt components off of it, and eventually you'll be able to scavenge them.

We currently only simulate convective heat transfer, but conduction between components is going to happen really soon.

I'm also excited about making hot stuff glow and radiate heat; I think it's going to look really cool.

Outro

That's all for this update!

Stayed tuned for more updates on MEANWHILE IN SECTOR 80.

MS80 Update #1

2023-05-28T16:00:00Z

Announcing Second Half Games

2023-04-14T16:00:00Z

Today we're officially launching our new game studio, Second Half Games!

Our first tech demo, ZOMBIE DEMO GAME, is available now on itch.io:

Our next game, MEANWHILE IN SECTOR 80, is under development. Stay tuned for updates as we have more to show!