Saturday @ Second Half #9 — Daylight Savings Vortex

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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!

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.

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.

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)