Saturday @ Second Half #5 — Docs & Blocks

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!

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.

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.

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!

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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!

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!