SSH #12 — A Place to Call Home

2025-03-29

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.

Last week, we built some modular kit pieces and did some important-but-boring planning.

This week, we've been firing on all cylinders! We've got polished core mechanics, a home ship, new puzzles, and slick editor features!

The New Home Ship— Harry & Laura

Laura's been working on a new version of our player's home ship. Until now the player has been living out of a square box so it's time for an upgrade!

The drop pod comes up through the floor now

The new ship is playing with more complex wall shapes, and splits the space into a level-selection map room and a drop-pod chamber. The drop-pod is actually under design review at the moment, as we decide whether a drop pod is really the way we want the player to reach levels.

Lucien is of the opinion that we should cut a hole in the floor of the ship so the player can just 'auto-defenestrate'. Still in the workshopping phase, clearly.

Core Mechanical Polish— Lucien

After the most recent playtest, we ended up with a big list of feedback on our core mechanics. I focused on fixing as much of that stuff as possible this week before moving onto all the new stuff.

We've got a new hit feedback effect!

Imagine the player cries out in pain with every hit. Oof! Oof! Oof!

This is where I would put videos for all the other fixes, but I've only just realized that none of them make for interesting videos. Damn.

Really quickly then, before I lose you: I fixed a bunch of bad collision cases, made the character controls snappier and jumpier, revamped our death mechanic, added animation interpolation between ticks and fixed key items getting broken by enemies and becoming useless. Whew!

Weighted Buttons— Rasmus

We now have weighted buttons to use for physics puzzles! We can easily tune them to control how much weight is needed to make them activate.

Have you ever played the fairly obscure game named "Portal"?

The Editor Improves— Eryn

We have a custom editor built into the engine that we're shipping with the game! That means that players get the same tools that we're using to build the game, which is something we're very excited about.

Eryn built a bunch of new features this week:

Add Entity Menu (Shift+A) — Can choose either prefabs or models. After selection, you automatically enter transform mode on the new object(s)
Duplicate Selection (Shift+D): Duplicates in-place, and directly enters transform mode on the selection. Just like Blender!
Stamp Button (hold Alt): Holding Alt while in transform mode and confirming the operation will place down the selection, create a duplicate, and re-enter transform mode again. This mode also retains your selected axis if you had one.
Axis Select (middle mouse): Just like Blender, you can now additionally press middle mouse to enter quick axis select mode regardless of which transform mode you're in (move, rotate, scale)

Check out this cool highlight video:

You get a new tool! And you get a new tool! And YOU...

Looking Ahead

It was a good week! I'm excited to switch to building new gameplay bits next week in preparation for the team playtest on Friday.

See you next week!