Saturday @ Second Half #1
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.
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!
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.
Concept Art— Laura
From the art side, we've been in the process of reworking components as we nail down our new art direction!
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.