SSH #15 — Crab Food
It's Saturday — that means it's time for your (mostly) regularly scheduled news about MEANWHILE IN SECTOR 80! Wishlist us on Steam and join our Discord server to stay up to date — we'd love to see you!
Last time, we built some new pipe and electronic props and introduced the electrical fan!
Our more recent focus has been: combat!
Combat
In the last two weeks, we've continued to experiment with new level layouts and enemy combinations to see what kind of combat encounters can be fun and challenging. My favourites are these tiny crab droids with an electrical shock stick mounted on the front — they rush you like metal desert lizards, moving like greased lightning to inflict you with deadly electric poison.
They aren't much trouble on their own, but face off against 9 of them charging you down a hallway and you can't run or hide!
We had a brainstorm session on Tuesday (there was a slideshow presentation and everything) examining how different game genres handle "the flow" of combat. Whatever decisions we make going forward, we need to carefully mix level shapes with different combinations of enemies — ideally moving between engagement ranges and heights to keep combat exciting.
That means no more endless hallways of death, and making sure the player always has some sort of goal in any room they enter — be it loot or survival!
We're really feeling that our current box of toys for weapon and enemy variety is a little limited, so we've dedicated some time to invent weird and wonderful new items for the player (and their foes) to wield. Hopefully we'll have more on this to show you in the coming weeks!
We're having a lot of fun imagining how weird we can go. Lucien is gripped by an unusual springtime Jingle Bells fever, and insists we need to create a rhythm minigame weapon that rewards you for playing the tune properly. I've broken three crowbars trying to extricate him from his office already.
Dragger Revamp— Rasmus
Our dedicated maths-wizard and evil scientist, has been hard at work improving our dragging technology. Here's what he had to say:
Dragging parts around is a core mechanic of our game. It is important that this is intuitive and easy to do. A tricky case is to place a part into a hole or a slot. Sockets snap to each other but it can be hard to fit a part into a tight spot when there isn't anything to snap it to. I am working on some improvements to make this easier. The old behavior places the part on the nearest surface that it touches, avoiding occlusions. The new behavior places the part on the surface that the mouse cursor touches, allowing occlusions.
The Player's Home Ship— Laura
Laura's done more work with environment lineart in Blender, seeing how our player's new home ship turns out!
This is part of a shiny new overhaul for the home ship in preparation for our big Steam page update — including all that we've changed about MEANWHILE IN SECTOR 80 over the last 5 months. This should be one of the game's first seriously polished pieces of content, and since the player is in here so often as they move between levels, we're hoping you like it!
Laura has also been working on a new shape for the drop pod, adding a significant amount of detail to the layout and appearance of the pod as we commit to our player's main form of transportation. Hopefully more on that next week!
Looking Ahead
Work continues on moving our physics library over from Rapier to Jolt. We're all excited to see how it feels to move around and fight in Jolt, and hoping it resolves some issues with the player clipping through walls and floors in the middle of intense firefights.
We've scheduled our next big internal playtest for two weeks from now. I'm aiming to make a new level that prevents the player from corner-peeking and hiding behind doors in combat encounters, with the goal being to try and encourage more risk taking and mobility under fire.