Saturday @ Second Half #3 — Back off the Horse
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.
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!
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!