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SSH #11 — Kangaroo Production

Lucien
Saturday @ Second Half #11

Happy Saturday!

It's time for some news about MEANWHILE IN SECTOR 80! As always, you can check us out on Steam — wishlists help a lot! — and you can join our thriving Discord community to get the latest news and send us memes.

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Last week, we unveiled our upgraded art style, featuring line art!

This week, we've been working on modular kits, gameplay polish, and everybody's favorite passtime: product planning.

Dragger Polish— Rasmus

There are now white contours when hovering over parts. They show a preview of dragging so that you know in advance all the parts that would be disconnected by starting a drag operation.

This uses the new outline system, which we'll be using for even more stuff in the future!
This uses the new outline system, which we'll be using for even more stuff in the future!

Building Kits— Harry & Laura

Hello, adjective nouns of the Second Half Games Discord Server!

Another biweekly playtest today - we didn't think we'd made many changes these last two weeks, but turns out some of our power tuning has done very weird things, to the extent that firing too powerful a laser will totally drain you of battery. Just goes to show why we need to keep playtesting regularly.

A few things were broken that weren't broken last time we playtested.
A few things were broken that weren't broken last time we playtested.

Something that is new though is we've been spending a lot of time learning how game levels are made by various studios! Particularly - Bethesda's use of modular kits. There's some great GDC talks out there that explain how and why studios go modular with their level design tools, and we think something similar is the right move for MS80. This lets us more efficiently create a variety of levels with different themes in our Cyrtanthus engine.

This level kit is called the "Kangaroo Kit". Ask us why!
This level kit is called the "Kangaroo Kit". Ask us why!

Here's a screenshot of the new kit that Laura put together this week, with the emissive red sections showing back-faces that aren't rendered in-game. Also, something very rough that I'm still working on to test the versatility of our new kit, inspired by a level from another game that features a good mix of horizontal and vertical spaces with clear player-flow.

Feeling the urge to throw jars of dubious liquid at people
Feeling the urge to throw jars of dubious liquid at people

Spaghetti carbonara for dinner.

Be good!

Production Planning— Lucien

I've worked on and scheduled work for software engineering teams. It turns out that production scheduling for a video game is way harder. It involves coordinating art, programming, writing, sound design, marketing, and so much more!

We've had a "roadmap" and a "production schedule" for some time, but they've always been of debatable utility and we've mostly worked week-to-week.

You know what they say: aim for the moon, land on the roof!
You know what they say: aim for the moon, land on the roof!

No more! I've been working this week on a proper internal roadmap. No plan survives contact with the enemy, but it's a heck of a lot better than driving on the freeway with sunglasses on at night. We've also been receiving some consulting on game production that's been immensely helpful.

Please enjoy the following image equally as much as the prior images.

Your outie enjoys writing planning documents.
Your outie enjoys writing planning documents.

Within the roadmap, we've got specific goals that have measurable, achievable outcomes that are relevant to the overall game direction delivered on a given timeframe. They're SMART!

This is a cry for help. Please let me out. I miss writing funny gameplay features.

Looking Ahead

We're plugging along. I've got a pile of feedback from the playtest to plug into our internal issue tracker for the team to start work on next week. I don't really want to do that. I think I'm going to go play video games instead.

See you next week!