Saturday @ Second Half #8 — The Ides of February

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!

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.

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:

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

See you all next week!